


Forever Hours

by LouRea (MementoVitae)



Series: A Devil Walks the Dragonsphere [3]
Category: Devil May Cry, NieR: Automata (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Fluff, Gen, Humor, Light Angst, Road Trips, World Travel, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-10
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:33:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 24,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23573179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MementoVitae/pseuds/LouRea
Summary: The distance from the City Ruins to the Normandy is 13800km. Walking, running, and commandeering a string of questionably functional means of transport, it’s a trip that takes 100 days. Plenty of time for two androids and a half-devil's humanity to get into trouble.
Series: A Devil Walks the Dragonsphere [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1440319
Comments: 52
Kudos: 89





	1. Foreword

**~Welcome to the Foreword~**

I think this fic is relatively self-explanatory and since it doesn't demand much in the way of plot, it can be considered self-contained as well. So I'll skip the big recap this time. If you are reading this completely blind to the rest of the series: Welcome! All you really need to know to jump in here are the following items:

  * This is Post DMC5 V in the Post Automata Route C timeline
  * 8E/Fern is the executioner from the Amnesia sidequest. 
  * 9S is rocking black hair and resistance clothes and going by "49" because he's trying to blend in
  * V has grown his own Devil Bringer due to a series of bizarre events involving maso and bone shards from Angelus. 
  * They are all trying to hide the fact that he's (mostly) human from other androids.



Do you want to know how 8E survived, how these three ended up together, and what exactly those 'bizarre events' were? Interested in found family, worldbuilding, and android politics against a backdrop of character exploration? Then go back, and give the rest a read. I promise you won't be disappointed.

As with Bild's foreword, I leave this pre-game here to bookmark and forget about until a rainy day update. I'll be taking it **very** easy with this fic. There's no set schedule, and it won't be more than 10 chapters, maybe 30k words at max. The only plan is to have it done by August so I can start The Wretched Simulacra in September. 

Take care of yourselves and stay well everyone.

* * *

__

_Who can recall the first forever-hour, Inviolate with mysteries?_

\- Edward Locke, A Garland of Six Posies

(Fun fact because I'm sure someone will ask. The signposts say 'Atone' 'Return' and 'Live')


	2. The Bend at Khabarovsk

What little gas Fern had managed to procure took them safely across the sea, but not by much. The boat pulled into the mouth of a small inlet just as the tank sputtered its last empty cough.

The town along the coast was larger and somehow emptier the one they'd departed from. A flat expanse of rusted, rundown shacks nestled up to the sea and sheltered by distant mountains whose vivid evergreens were cloaked in low-hanging clouds. Grass came up to V's waist and fully grown trees shed petals and pollen on houses half consumed by gnarled bark. Machine parts littered the area, but they were old and few and stray, like tires taken far away from the husks of vehicles they must have been a part of once.

Nothing but plants and insects had lived in that place for a long time, and they didn't linger long enough to change that.

They moved north and west, according to a route that V had not offered input on. Any knowledge he might have had was comically outdated, so it had seemed only wise to leave the path making to those who knew better. But within a few days, it became clear that Fern and 9S were moving in the straightest line possible toward their destination. The terrain was dense, craggy, and difficult. He might have pointed out their lack of common sense, but ten thousand years without civilization meant that even mountain passes were treacherous places only barely less of a hassle than the direct route.

Far from where machines or androids bothered to go, the world was without shortcuts or conveniences. Even with Shadow to help him navigate up the slopes and Griffon to help him glide down, their progress was modest.

If their pace didn't quicken, it would be winter again before they arrived at Normandy.

V kept that concern to himself, of course. Complaint would not make the first leg of the journey go any faster and worrying would only serve to waste the precious energy he required to go as far as possible in a single day. It would have also drawn attention to a fact he didn't care to dwell on: He was the one setting their pace—and setting it back.

Fern and 9S were always going to be faster, but more importantly, they didn't grow tired or hungry or thirsty. They didn't have to deal with any aches in their metal joints or the stiffness of a feebly constructed body struggling to acclimate to the burden of near-constant motion. If the integrity of their bodies suffered at all during the fourteen or so hours they spent on the move, ten minutes of maintenance was all that was necessary to restore them. At least in this, he could console himself that no amount of power or wholeness would have made a meaningful difference. To be Vergil would have been to go a greater distance, but Fern and 9S would always outpace him in the end.

If he did not fully appreciate the differences between their capabilities before, he would before this journey ended.

After eight days, they came to the bend of a river so broad the other side was just a strip of dark ridges on the horizon. V leaned on his cane, not daring to relax too quickly, while 9S shifted the straps from his shoulders and eased his cargo down.

"Hey," he whispered into the burlap. "Anybody else out here with us?"

Two red antennae popped up from the flaps.

"REPORT: NO RESISTANCE SIGNALS DETECTED."

"REPORT: NO MACHINE LIFE FORMS DETECTED."

Fern loosed a loud sigh and dropped the other bag down in the tangles of tall grass. She rolled her shoulders with similarly noisy appreciation and settled her hands on her hips. "So, this is it then?"

9S pulled up a display with the map of the area. It lacked detail just like the one he had of the city, but there was no mistaking the dark, winding streak of the river across the left side of the screen. "Yeah, this is the one. It should carry us at least as far as Sector I."

"Assuming we can find a boat."

"Looks like there's an old city about 22 km up around the east riverbend. I can—"

"Nope." Fern stayed him with a raise of her hand. "I'll go. You stay with V."

9S watched her trot off into the shrubbery. Fern was always the one who went ahead. She was the combat model who could better tackle any physical risks and she was the worldly one who was better able to navigate the company of normal androids. It made sense to V. It likely made sense to 9S as well, yet there was a hint of frustration in the way he frowned after her.

The look was gone by the time he turned to V. "You hungry?"

"I can't recall many hours since we began this journey when I wasn't."

9S hummed. Perhaps he was unable to reconcile increased activity with needing more energy from external sources. "Must be tough."

V didn't answer and didn't wait for 9S to make the obvious offer. Not with the river right there and Fern bound to be gone for at least the next five or six hours. He threw Pod 042 into the current and tossed his boots aside just as carelessly. Shadow curled and coiled around his back as he sat and sank his legs into the cold. A faint sigh was all he permitted himself. The full scale of his relief would have been mortifying to betray.

9S busied himself making a modest fire. He was quieter than usual. They all were. The nature of traveling through unfamiliar territory in semi-unfamiliar company had given both androids a wary edge that sanded down their animated dispositions and revealed them for the soldiers they were. But 9S' current silence was a distracted kind. One that lingered well after a fish was caught and cooked. One that kept turning his gaze subtly back the way they'd come.

"Something out there of interest to you?" asked V.

"Huh? Oh, no." He hunched into his cloak. "I don't know. I spent so much time back in the city. Pretty much my whole life. My 48th one, anyway. I keep feeling…"

From the corner of his eye, V watched him struggle for the better part of two minutes before he offered: "Displaced?"

"Lost." 9S caught the suspicious way V eyed the overgrowth around them and tossed a stalk of grass that went nowhere near its target. "Not like _that._ I keep getting this feeling like I'm supposed to be back there. Or that I'm not really sure how I got here. Even though I know exactly what I'm doing here. It's odd being away, I guess."

"I see." V plucked a thin, translucent bone from his lips. "You're homesick."

9S head fell, his eyes wandering the short grass as he lapsed back into bewildered silence.

There was a splash somewhere between their bank and the opposite one. The waters were relatively still at the water's edge, but they were muddy and choppy further out. Somewhere upstream, spring thaw or spring rain was churning the idle flow. V only hoped it was the fore as he fought the skeleton of his catch for meat.

"Do you ever get homesick, V?"

"Not particularly."

9S' gaze unmistakably focused on the bracelet clasped around V's wrist. "...Did you used to?"

V stopped chewing.

9S had been very honest about how much he saw of V and Fern's time together while he was trapped in her mind. The bracelet's origin and importance were not mysteries to him. Perhaps that was why the question was low and careful, seeking permission to be asked almost as much as it sought an answer.

"Yes." He relinquished the remains of the fish and all its bothersome bones to Shadow. "I used to."

Without a word, 9S scooted closer to sit at his usual polite distance. Above, the sun was as bright as ever between vast, cottony piles of clouds, but the shadows had grown a few inches longer, and the shafts of light dropping through the trees a few degrees steeper. The same endless sunshine, frozen in a slightly different place relative to the still Earth.

V held out his arm.

9S shied away, his tone sulky and defensive. "I wasn't gonna ask."

V shot him a witheringly unconvinced aside glance and tugged his sleeve back. "Then I have spared you the effort. You should accept, before I think better of it."

For once, 9S looked with his eyes alone. Examining the ornate arrangement of crescent and butterfly and gemstone on the face. The silver embellishments to the band that resembled curving bones and claws. When looking no longer satisfied him he did use his hands, but only to tilt V's forearm to his liking. Tactile as he'd been with examining V's hands, he ventured no more than the gentlest prod at the bangle's horn-like protrusions.

"When the fire happened," he said carefully. "It burned everything, didn't it. Not just her."

V gave a wry smile and sank his chin down on his other hand. He'd seen such stark visions of that day so many times in the grip of his maso fever. There was no point in 9S being so vague. But he didn't know that, and V wasn't in any hurry to make the spoken details finer than they needed to be.

"It did."

"How old were you?"

"…Eight."

9S eyes unfocused. It was unlikely that he had any frame of reference for what it meant to be an eight-year-old, but he tried. With everything he had, he tried. And perhaps he came close because V had to rap his fingers with the cane where his grip had turned rigid and vise-tight around V's arm.

"Sorry," he blurted, and yanked his hands back, close to his stomach. Despite the red imprint left behind in V's skin, he noted 9S' hands still didn't shake. Given the truth, his programming no longer plagued him. "That's so—so young."

V said nothing. There was nothing to say.

"How did you survive?"

"With my sword and strength." And those were very different memories. Ones that he had not had the opportunity to linger on. "In a sea of red."

"On white streets," 9S completed. "I lose my faith."

The shadow of a cloud raced over the water, covered them, and passed on its way. V waited, but the question he was expecting did not come. 9S was watching the river with a sentimental smile.

"2B told me that some things are hard to talk about for old soldiers. If it's just a bunch of bad memories, I don't need to know. Like I said, I never expected you to tell me everything."

It wasn't an inaccurate comparison. Warrior, soldier—semantics, really. 9S was correct, both in that he did not need to know, and that it was a bunch of bad memories. It would suit V fine to not think of them at all. And yet his mind was suddenly occupied with old things and old places and nostalgia that didn't suit him. Gone years full of gone joys. Just like the rediscovered memories of his mother, he thought they might be better treasured than discarded. Even if they did all end in ash and blood.

"It would seem that speaking of homesickness is like speaking of the devil." 9S tilted his head, and V smirked. "Say its name, and it appears."

"Then you are homesick?"

"Apparently. Even I have known my share of happy hours. I could spare you the task of asking again, if you are curious."

"I am." 9S' eyes brightened. In anyone else, that immediate eagerness would have cast an insincere light on the previous moment's consideration. For him, it was natural. "If you're offering."

V glanced down, where his sleeve was still tugged back, and the silver bangle curved around his wrist. A faint, amused hum left him.

"I suppose I am."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I cannot explain to y'all how good it feels to write these two just being themselves next to each other again. Especially now that all the dirt's been dug up and dealt with and they really *know* each other.


	3. Along the Amur River

Eleven hours passed before Fern reappeared with the patched remains of a small sailboat. It must've been caught in a crossfire at some point. Neglect alone couldn't account for the warped edge where the mast had seemingly melted off, or for the any of the bullet marks pocking the upper edge of the hull. An old road sign she'd probably yanked right out of the street let her row her way up to them in the absence of a sail or a real oar.

49 thought it was pretty resourceful. V, on the other hand, pressed the back of his fist to his mouth and looked off in another direction so it would be less obvious that he was laughing. Considering she was moving against the current her progress wasn't that bad. It just seemed to 49 that they could be a lot more efficient.

He hadn't expected the pods to agree so quickly when he suggested they push the boat. Pods didn't have sensors for pain. Physical discomfort wasn't an issue and neither of them had complained about their transport over land. Still, they seemed almost excited to hang off the back of the boat together. Not a moment after he said it, they were both floating around the edges of the hull, chattering between each other on what the best support configuration would be. After a little experimentation, they ended up latched on side by side just above the rusted rudder.

Not like he couldn't blame them. Easy work in the full light of the springtime sun had to be better than doing nothing inside a dark backpack. They looked kind of like a fancy engine, so Fern didn't think there'd be a problem on the off chance they passed other androids by.

He and Fern had always planned to come straight to that river. It was the most obvious way to speed up the first leg of the journey since it stretched all the way through two sectors. With the pods on duty, initial travel time estimates were rendered obsolete. In good weather, they'd cruise for eight to ten hours at a time. Fern would watch in front and V would doze at the back, meaning 49 was free to catch up on the data the other scanners had left him without worrying too much about his surroundings. His readouts were a dead giveaway that he wasn't a standard model, but it was easy enough to just hold up a physical map behind them. Sometimes the extra visual information could be a bother, but it wasn't so bad.

When it was time to take a break, they'd pick a secluded spot, usually with low-hanging boughs or craggy overhangs on whichever side of the bank looked easiest to pull into. V fished. 49 would build a fire and checked their course. Fern'd wander off. Sometimes to scout, more often to find fresh water since the river wasn't viable. The few structures they passed that weren't decayed dockside villages were hulking, rusted industrial sites whose drainage pipes still managed to belch out dribbles of sludgy waste.

49 couldn't help noticing Fern never took the opportunity to treat their downtime like downtime. She never gave him a chance to do the scouting or look for supplies even though he was built for it. When he tried, she always said no. Or left before he could get in a word.

Yes, she was better equipped to deal with trouble. And she was used to how ground androids behaved if she ran into any. And she knew what to look out for better than he did. And yeah, yeah, fine there were probably forty more reasons she was the better pick to go marching off into unfamiliar territory. But he got the feeling that even if none of those reasons existed, she still would have found a reason to separate herself from them.

He never got the impression she wasn't coming back, so he did his best to mind his own business.

Bad weather grew more frequent as the days passed and they progressed further west. The light, spitting rains they first encountered were easy to push through. But there were days where the wind squalled, and rain fell in hard-to-predict bursts that swelled the river into a writhing monster that the pods couldn't control. That weather was the only thing that could still slow them down. Androids were too heavy to swim, and V couldn't have challenged currents like that even if he wasn't so slim. More importantly, it would be a long trip on foot if anything happened to the boat. So they always pulled ashore wherever there were intact buildings and waited it out.

Today, the skies were clear.

The boat was partially pulled ashore, and V stretched out inside it, his breaths slow and rhythmic and uniquely audible between the pages of the book covering his face. For most of their first few days on the water, he'd slept so much that 49 worried he was sick. The on-foot part of the journey must have exhausted him, whether he would admit it or not. Lately, he napped more out of boredom than necessity. It probably made the time go faster.

Normally, 49 would also be bored out of his mind with so little to do. But lately, he was fine with just watching the sky. All of the old world records he'd gone through said that the moon used to rise and set just about every day all over the world. With Earth's rotation halted, that was no longer true. The moon was out there somewhere, quietly drifting along on its own orbit. On this side of the world, it would always be a new moon invisible to his eye, but that would change as they got closer to the night kingdom.

The thought of his first moonrise was all he needed to let the time idle by.

Quick and confident bootsteps squelched in the soggy grass, catching 49's attention. He kicked some extra dirt over where he'd already gotten rid of the remains of the fire and trotted down to the bank just in time to meet Fern.

"Woah!" He skidded, and instinctively took a step back. "What's with the guns?"

"Spoils of war," she said, adjusting the strap of a mean-looking rifle over her shoulder with a toothy grin. "This one's for me since I don't have a pod. Here, you take this and give that one to V."

V had dragged the book down off his face and was holding out his hand. Must've been a light sleep. 49 climbed into the boat, handed it to him, and watched with surprise as he deftly checked the magazine.

"Only two?" V asked.

"The hell do you need ammo for?" Fern countered, kicking the boat back down into the water and nimbly hopping aboard. "They're just for blending in. Neither of you needs a gun and I wouldn't trust either of you with one if you did."

Whatever crossed V's mind, he didn't say. Didn't really have to when he could convey 'If that's what you want to believe' without opening his mouth. Amused arrogance was still glinting in his eye as he lazily turned his gaze. "You can't shoot, 9S?"

"Forty-nine," he corrected. "Gunner models haven't existed in three years. There's a lot of manual correction involved in accurately firing a ranged weapon, and the ammunition of physical arms is limited so there's not a lot of room for error."

Fern snickered. "In other words: No, he can't shoot."

"I wasn't calibrated to shoot! I managed to aim a missile by myself; I can figure out a gun!"

"You can't hack a gun." She settled in at the head of the boat and swung her road sign-turned-paddle over her shoulder. "Seriously, they're just so we look normal. If you're in a situation where shooting seems necessary, Pod and Griffon are way better guns than anything I'd be willing to let you handle. I just thought we should acquire some before we get close to Sector H. We'd stick out pretty bad if we were unarmed."

"I was under the impression it was peaceful territory," said V.

A sharp laugh hissed between Fern's teeth and she leaned her chin on her fist. "I see you know as much about ground life as you do about YoRHa. There's no such thing as peaceful territory on the ground. Even after the network collapse and the treaty, we still had to deal with those aggressive machines in the forest kingdom, right? Same deal. Sector H is 'low-aggression', not 'no aggression' and there's no such thing as an unarmed ground unit. Remember that."

V took the lecture with surprising grace. After giving the gun one last skeptical glance, he tucked it away. "Machines don't seem like they would be terribly inconvenienced by bullets."

"They aren't," 49 clarified. "You have to have really high caliber munitions or the physical specs to survive extended combat with weaker guns to kill anything but the weaker machines. A single YoRHa has both of those things, but ground androids have to work in squads and have strong coordination to kill off machines with guns alone."

V's fingers adjusted around his cane, index finger tapping an agitated rhythm on the metal. He had the same look in his eye that he'd had in the resistance camp when he called the relationship between YoRHa and androids 'fascinating'. "It is difficult to believe your predecessors were so inefficient for so many thousands of years."

49 shrugged. He didn't disagree. It still frustrated him, but it didn't make him mad the way it had that day in the amusement park. Maybe early on androids had instinctively taken up the fight to protect humanity's remains, but somewhere along that way that stopped. Winning the war stopped being as important as fighting in the war. Androids had made some progress, but maybe R&D had never moved away from the original designs.

His thought routines slowed. For a long stretch, he was alone with only the sun sparkling off the gray-green ripples and the suck and splash of water against the boat for processing activity.

"Hey..." he ventured slowly. "What do you think the first androids were actually built to do?"

Fern stared at him, turned her attention to the clear and open waters ahead, and pulled her cloak in around her shoulders. "Take care of humanity, probably."

She said it so easily. Dismissively, even. But 49 found that he couldn't imagine what types of androids would have been necessary to help normal humans acclimate to a world like this one. Devola and Popola had been overseers before the machine wars and there must have been multiple celebrants sending the maso away too, but they couldn't have been the only androids around back then. There must've been many, many more with all kinds of specializations keeping the world and the project functioning even while the gestalts relapsed and the replicants died from the black scrawl.

It had never occurred to him that the standard models might be the modified descendants from blueprints that had not been drawn with war in mind at all. Or that YoRHa models, by extension, were also a part of that legacy.

A legacy which must have included the capacity for emotion.

They were all designed to care for humans in one way or another. To do that effectively, they had to have the capacity to care about them. To connect with them. They had to have hearts. No one in R&D anywhere along the way was willing to take that core aspect out of production, even if it would have made them better killers. Would they even still be androids if they didn't have that capacity? Then along came Beepy, prompting machines and androids alike to think about what it meant to be alive and muddying the matter even further...

49 looked down the gun in his lap. A weapon that humans had used, that androids now used, even though they were underpowered and inefficient against the enemy they faced. Even though they had been inefficient for thousands of years. Android model updates might be so slow not because of time or cost, but simply because designing new androids wasn't in the design of the original androids. He tried to picture what those early models were like and what they might have been assigned to do.

Anthurium came to mind. An android as welcoming as a fireplace in the cold. He wanted to learn to cook. To throw humanity a feast. It made him so happy he was even willing to consult with a machine about it. What business did such a soft-hearted guy have being a soldier? The disposition that could create a desire like that was definitely intended for deployment in times of peace.

Every angry word he'd spoken about android design flaws, he took back. YoRHa was a triumph given the limitations, and he laughed because the truth was absurd and there was nothing else he could do about it.

Androids were _terrible_ at war.


	4. Lake Baikal

Rust-tinged droplets raced across the upper threshold of a doorway that hadn't had a door in decades, pushed along by a racing wind. The rain fell at a steep incline that kept its tidal drumming more to the walls than the roof and every gust moaned and whistled around the mouths of half a dozen disused smokestacks somewhere above out heads. Below, the river drowned the runoff pipes built into the concrete embankment. The current was sucking god-only-knew what out into the water and every now and again, when the wind paused for breath, a strong scent of acrid chemicals settled on the air.

With weather this bad, I was glad I'd insisted on carrying the boat up the flight of stairs to the leaky control room we were sheltering in. It probably would have sailed off without us otherwise.

"And you said there's a defense HQ out there?"

"Used to be," 49 answered from further in. Under the cover of his cloak, he was preoccupied with squinting at his readouts. "It fell behind enemy lines, but there's a reasonable chance of ground transport still being intact. I can give you directions, but it'll probably be faster if I go with you."

I watched the river rise another fraction. "I'm good alone."

"With no material analysis? No support? It'll take you forever assuming you find it at all!"

"Yeah, I know." I turned, crossing my arms and leaning against the soggy entrance. "But you can't just leave V alone out here. This used to be a high aggression zone and you've seen all the factories we've passed."

"All the more reason we should get a hold of a fast vehicle as fast as we can. V has Pod, Griffon, Shadow, and Nightmare. If he went hand to hand with you, he can handle some machines."

"I went easy on him."

From one of the few dry patches in the room, V eyed me maliciously over the edge of his book. I pretended not to notice, the same way he always pretended he wasn't involved in these arguments.

"Really?" asked 49, too casually to avoid sounding smug. "Felt like you had battle fever from where I was."

"Some of us can experience battle fever and still make intelligent decisions. Those of us who were actually designed for combat, for example."

"Yeah, well, I'm designed for intelligence operations that included pathing through hostile zones, identifying resources, and establishing escape vectors. This was the job I was doing when nobody was there to save or salvage me, and I wasn't called top of the line just because I'm nice to look at."

So he had it too. That narcissism I was accustomed to hearing from imposing and seasoned combat units with specialties even an executioner would hesitate to confront. I'd heard once that a battler who shared my number was a monster whose combat processing speed was so good she could run upwards of five weapon routines at once without missing a beat. 49 wasn't that good, but he'd survived pretty much unscathed despite logic virus infection and direct confrontation with the totality of the machine network and that was more than any other YoRHa could say. It was probably easy to be proud of.

I'm sure there was probably one of us who stood out as the best or had the top shelf capabilities among E models, but I had never run into another executioner who was quick to make that boast.

"Alright, alright." I laced my fingers behind my neck and sighed. "If you got a plan, sell it to me."

"Well, we're approaching mountain territory and the rivers are starting to break up into smaller and smaller streams. We've crossed intact roads—"

"Intact?" I repeated flatly. "Really?"

"Drivable," he corrected. "And they're exactly where all the old maps say they are, which is more than I can say for the rivers." He shuffled up onto his feet and joined me at the doorway to share his readout. "There's a big lake about a hundred kilometers north that we can reach if we go right at the upcoming fork in the river. See, right here? We'll go with V as far as this spot on the east bank. Pod 042 can take him over here, to this inlet on the southwest side. We'll split off and follow this road around the south bend and work our way up to this area."

"The triangle?"

"Yeah, that's where the HQ site was. And that upper road is the one we'll take if we find ground transport."

I reached over and flicked at his screen. "And the road goes all the way out to Sector F… It'd be nice, I'll give you that. What's our backup plan?"

"Get back in the boat, I guess." He slid his map back into the position he'd had it at with only a little obvious annoyance. "We'll set the rendezvous point right here on this fork on the east side. If we can't find anything, we just meet up with V and keep going until we run out of river." He closed the screen with a flick and a troubled frown. "They're already getting smaller and taking different twists than the intel I have, so I think it'll be a lot sooner than we were estimating."

"And it would be back to walking after that, huh…" We both looked at V. He didn't pay us any mind, but his fingers started to drum along the length of his cane. Outside, the wind picked up until the rain sounded like gunfire battering the old walls. I leaned back against the doorway and watched it rain sideways. "Guess that settles it."

* * *

It took a day for the rain to let up and another twelve hours for the river to be safe enough to traverse.

I watched the skies as we came to the bend 49 had mentioned and followed the northern fork. I watched them when we arrived at the lake and left V in Pod 042's care. I followed 49 with half my processing power focused on the shape of the clouds at the horizon. Even though I knew I wouldn't be able do anything about it, I felt better whenever I could see for myself that there were no rain clouds building at the horizon.

The old defense HQ was exactly where 49 said it would be and was in exactly the condition I expected it would be. Bombed out windows in a squat, square building made of the same sun-washed concrete most machine-reconstructed structures used. They recreated buildings, we drove them out and moved in, they came back and drove us out. Same old, same old, but the trouble was that when machines drove us out, they didn't give a shit about structural integrity or geographically advantageous locations. Wherever there were androids, they arrived in swarms or launched barrages of artillery that could flatten mountains.

How anyone ever convinced themselves we were going to win against an enemy whose solutions didn't need to account for efficiency or resource use was beyond me, but what did I know? I wasn't built to command specifications.

"You pickin' anything up?" I asked.

49 gave an indefinite mumble and stalked around the side of the building.

I glanced at the sky. Crossing the lake and coming up the inlet was half the distance we'd run, but our land speed was more than double Pod's boat speed. We had about three hours to make this happen.

"Over here!"

I jogged after the sound of his voice to find him perched atop a half-destroyed wall three meters too tall for a normal android to scale, much less with a pack containing a 40kg pod. Could he have used the rubble to climb up there? Sure. But the way he winced and immediately climbed down when I scowled at him told me he'd hopped it out of habit.

"Strike one."

"Sorry," he muttered. "But look, this must've been their parking area. One of them has to be functional right?"

I breezed past him. Five trucks intact, none in particularly bad shape as resistance vehicles went. Even the least battered one was a dirty, half-rusted piece of shit, but if the engine bothered to turn over there was pretty much no stopping them. "Your source say how old this place was when it got run over?"

"No. He was stationed up in Sector C and their defense HQ was wiped out in 11944. From the records, it sounds like there was a period where Sector I was classed as extreme-aggression, and all surrounding ones were classed high because of it. So if I had to guess—"

"This base went down maybe a few months before the one in C," I completed, taking in how few machine parts were laying around. I lifted the nearest hood and examined the battery. Dead for sure, but not destroyed. I retracted my skin, tugged my shirt up, and waited for my plates to depressurize while digging into my pack for my cables.

"What—" He turned away. "What are you doing?"

I lifted my motherboard and bit my glove off so I could feel around for the appropriate nodes. "Checking to see if these batteries will hold a charge."

"With your black box?!"

"Yeah? We're all walking around with pretty sophisticated reactors in our bodies. Lots of ground tech has been altered to take advantage of that."

"That has to be against regulations."

"Sure is," I said with a toothy smirk, and snapped the clamps on the ends of the cables at him. "But the resistance doesn't get fancy flight units or dedicated repair crews. They have to come up with their own solutions to these problems."

A sober look crossed his face like the shadow of a bird passing overhead. He checked out of reality and into his own head—which I'd come to understand was a scanner thing. Some kind of analytics-enhancing state. Which was fine by me for the few minutes it took to dig into the dashboard and try to get the truck's engine to start.

What I got was a muted bang that startled 49 enough for him to reflexively evade away. I wagged a finger at him while the engine coughed and let out a plaintive grinding noise that faded into nothing. "Strike two."

"It sounded like close-range munitions!"

"One and a half," I relented gracefully. That engine was no good. I removed the cables and closed my paneling back up, rubbing at my chin as I considered the other trucks. "Alright. You're on scavenger duty."

"Sure, we need gas right?"

"For starters." I kicked experimentally at a sad-looking tire. The rubber was cracked and the whole thing sagged against the concrete. "Gas cylinder, rubber tube… spare battery if you can swing it. Resistance hubs usually have a few laying around. Keys preferred, but not necessary so don't get hurt looking for 'em. Meet back here in an hour."

"Only an hour? We've got plenty of time. Pod 042's signal is still a long way off."

"One hour. I don't want you wandering off and getting into trouble."

"First you didn't want to let me come with you and now you don't want to let me out of your sight?" A slow frown crept across his face and he crossed his arms. If he was mad, the bemused tilt of his head sure didn't help him make a point of it. "I was doing my best to leave you alone, but you've been acting weird since we reached the mainland."

I dropped down and slid my upper half under the carriage. There was nothing down there for me to check. Leaks, maybe—and I clicked my teeth as I immediately noted dark, slick patches on the otherwise dusty metal that clearly didn't come from the recent rain. The illusion of being preoccupied with my task was nice given my processing power was funneling exponentially toward ways to not have this conversation.

"I'm just trying to keep you out of harm's way."

"You and everybody else," he said, in an unexpectedly bitter grumble.

"Can you blame me? You are kind of hooked up to the final YoRHa kill switch."

Silence answered. He squatted down on the other side of the truck and when I tilted my head back I could see him all but calling me an asshole with his glare. A skill I didn't think he actually had. Either V was rubbing off on him or I was. "Fern, you don't care about dying."

I shrugged. "My current assignment is to get V to the night kingdom, and I can't do that if you're dead."

He straightened back up. His boots paced off a bit, like he was going to drop it and get on with his scavenger hunt. That would have been too lucky. The truck shook above me as he dropped down with his back against a tire. "You're avoiding V, too."

"I'm sure he's heartbroken."

"No, I don't think—" His processors caught up; he must not have been used to hearing that kind of sarcasm from other androids. " _Why_ are you avoiding V?"

"What do you mean 'why'? I used you as a hostage a month ago, and V strikes me as the type to hold a grudge."

He surprised me with a mellow laugh. "Yeah. Me too."

49 rarely ever reacted the way I thought he would, and this was no exception. There was an implicit, shared framework for us to work together as fellow YoRHa, but every time we went outside of that, he lost me. My personal experience with him was as someone who hated me before I even understood the real reasons why. I was always at a bit of a loss for how to deal with him when he didn't show any animosity.

"Just promise me you'll remember that you can change your mind, okay?" His voice had lowered. I wouldn't have thought he could speak so softly. Not to me. "V can't choose if he does or doesn't trust you if you just avoid him. And he'll need someone he can trust when I leave for the moon."

He did that on purpose. Making it about choice. He did it on purpose and I could've strangled the little bastard because a familiar and shameful burn filled my chest, like corrosive eating at my black box. I was angry. At him, for making me feel that way. At myself, for feeling it at all. Any android would be overjoyed to have purpose bestowed on them as directly as I had. But the old Fern had learned firsthand just how wide the gap was between being needed and being wanted, and even as 8E, I couldn't unlearn that lesson.

Even though I was supposed to be dead, and the dead had no business wanting anything.

Quietly as I could, I vented the heat building in my body and carefully modulated my voice. "Why should I promise you a damn thing?"

"I was being figurative, I think. You don't have to actually promise me anything. It's only a hunch," he said, climbing back to his feet. "But I figured you might be feeling a lot of the same things I did when I first met V."

The one time I really hoped he would keep talking and he disappointed me. Without elaborating, his boots scurried off across the lot, rounded a corner, and disappeared.

I hauled myself back into the sunlight and let the task at hand occupy me. Kicked at the rest of the tires. Wandered around the front end of the nearest truck that hadn't blown out any tires and didn't have any old oil spots hiding in its shadow or under the wheels. It didn't have any paint on it at all—a good sign that it was built rather than restored. Bit rusty from sitting in the elements and it the hood screamed like hell when I lifted it, but it was probably going to be our best bet. The inside was squelchy with the recent rain. Ammonia singed my scent receptors when I climbed in. Animal urine, baked in and bound to keep V in the truck bed until bad weather forced him inside.

I crossed my arms over the steering wheel and looked at the clear sky. "Feeling what you felt, hm..."

There was a lot 49 could've meant by that, and he either knew exactly what he was talking about or didn't have a damn clue. Either way, I wouldn't say I doubted those words. What I doubted was the implication that my feelings toward V would get the comfortable kind of resolution that 49's had.

That sounded far too much like one of the old Fern's self-soothing stories for me to believe.


	5. The Novosibirsk Split

** “STATUS REPORT: IN TRANSIT **

** WEATHER: HEAVY PRECIPITATION **

** TEMPERATURE: 19.4 CELSIUS” **

“QUERY: WHAT FUNCTION IS POD 042 CURRENTLY PERFORMING?”

Pod 042 turned with a somewhat excitable click of his digits. Pod 153’s presence had not surprised him as he was always aware of their proximity to one another, but it was unexpected that she would inquire about his activities. “REPORT: THIS POD IS KEEPING A PERSONAL LOG. ACCORDING TO THE ARCHIVES, THIS WAS A COMMON PRACTICE DURING EXTENDED GROUND TRAVEL.”

“POD 042,” 153 said, sounding somewhat tired despite their inability to experience fatigue. “ALL ACTIVE PODS KEEP COMPLETE AUDIOVISUAL LOGS. KEEPING A SECONDARY LOG OF THE SAME DATA IS UNNECESSARY AND IS A WASTE OF ENERGY AND RESOURCES.”

“ALL AUDIOVISUAL DATA IS RECORDED AS-IS. PERSONAL LOGS ALLOW THIS POD TO RECORD PERSONAL OBSERVATIONS AND CONCERNS.”

From the neighboring ring of tires nestled against the wall of the truck bed, Pod 053’s antenna poked up, spun, and receded.

“QUERY: WHAT CONCERNS DOES POD 042 HAVE?”

“PERSONAL OBSERVATIONS AND CONCERNS,” Pod 042 repeated. In actuality, he didn’t have any yet. The idea had only come to him a few hours ago, while watching the road disappear behind the truck from over the rim of the unevenly stacked tires he’d been stored in. His records so far were merely things that caught his interest, but he experienced a sense of hesitancy at the concept of reporting that to Pod 153. “THEY ARE NON-ESSENTIAL TO MISSION OUTCOMES. IT IS UNNECESSARY TO SHARE THIS DATA WITH POD 153.”

“…ACKNOWLEDGED. RECOMMENDATION: CONDUCT YOUR RECORDINGS IN SILENT MODE.”

Pod 042 continued to watch the adjacent stack, as though the black treads would somehow provide insight into the thought processes of the other support unit. When they did not and there was no further movement, he sank back down into the cover of his own tires. Per her excellent recommendation, he entered silent mode, and there he made his first personal observation:

Despite no change in mode of expression, Pod 153’s response conveyed a sense of offense.

* * *

** STATUS: OBSERVING UNITS FERN, FORTY-NINE, AND SUBJECT V **

** LOCATION: ROADSIDE FIELD**

** WEATHER: HIGH WINDS, INTERMITTENT RAIN **

** TEMPERATURE: 18.7 CELSIUS **

** REPORT FOLLOWS: **

Severe structural damage to the highway proved beneficial for the purpose of rest stops. Dense woodland and other forms of physical cover were rarely further away than the edge of the road. On this stop, the truck had been parked among stalks of high-growing local flora that came up to what remained of the vehicle’s side-view mirrors.

Pod 153 had already provided clearance; however, the possibility could not be eliminated that other androids might rapidly enter immediate range. Unit Fern, previously designated YoRHa Unit 8E, sat on the truck’s hood and watched for any signs of activity on the roadway. Unit 49, previously designated YoRHa unit 9S, knelt over an unsatisfactory fire. Burnable materials were scarce owing to the frequent rain, and the persistent wind presented additional difficulty. Given these conditions, constructing a heat source strong enough to cook the medium-sized lagomorph secured by unit Griffon was a challenging task.

Subject V was stretching. It was common for him to briefly do so upon waking from sleep cycles, but he now engaged this activity during every rest stop for several minutes at a time. This change had been noted by both YoRHa units, who had presented a subsequent query, but the answer was obvious. The distance between the interior seating and the dashboard was approximately 9% shorter than the distance between the joints of Subject V’s hip and knee.

“I’m not getting anywhere with this…” Unit 49 grumbled. “You can’t eat this raw, can you?”

“I could,” said Subject V. “But that does not mean I should.”

“You’ve got pods,” Unit Fern offered. “We’re alone out here. Just laser it real quick or something.”

Subject V and Unit 49 looked at one another, likely remembering that the proposed course of action had been taken before. Unit 49 looked somewhat embarrassed. He only grew more so when Subject V’s expression turned sly.

“Perhaps we should. And perhaps the two of you should be the ones to eat it.”

Unit Fern turned from her vigil with wide eyes. “Us? You know we don’t need—why would _we_ eat it?”

“Both of you have concluded that lasering a carcass is a valid cooking method. It may serve you well to learn firsthand the taste of your bad ideas.”

“Hey, I already learned my lesson with the tea!”

Unit Fern became distracted enough to swing her legs over the driver’s side window. “You made tea?”

“How do you even know what tea is?”

“Old Fern’s shack studies.” She crossed her arms and raised her chin in an uncommon display of hubris. “I know about coffee too. What happened? You mess it up?”

“Calling it tea would be an overgenerous description,” said Subject V. “It was more like a stew.”

Unit Fern made no attempt to hide that she found this statement humorous.

Unit 49 scuffed out the sad fire and wagged the carcass in her direction. “You’re laughing a lot even though the only reason we’re having this conversation is because you came up with the same bad idea I did.” He scowled up at Subject V. “And you still drank it anyway...”

“That is so, yet neither here nor there. The question is…" He flicked his cane up to point at the rabbit. “Can either of you come up with a _good_ idea?”

The YoRHa units thought quietly. At nearly the same time, their eyes dropped to Subject V’s glove, and they exclaimed in unison: “Your arm!”

Subject V grimaced. “My arm?”

“It generates enough heat to burn through leather,” said Unit Fern. “That thing can definitely cook a rabbit.”

“I’m not doing that.”

“Come on, V,” urged Unit 49. “It’s the best option we have right now. We should at least see if it works.”

With both units watching him expectantly, and no better prospect for cooking available, Subject V was left no alternative but to accept the proposed action. He reluctantly loosened the straps holding the glove in place, baring the transformed forearm, and took the animal in hand. A red glow appeared between the scales and intensified until a faint sizzling could be heard. Moisture and fat dripped down over his claws and into the dirt.

He appeared to be annoyed by this, but he still ate it.

Unit 49 climbed into the back of the truck. “Least we know you won’t starve if the rain keeps up.”

“I might.” Subject V tossed the last of the bones to Unit Shadow and joined Unit 49 in the truck bed. He flicked his hand several times, but the lingering oils clung on. “This was a performance I’d rather not repeat.”

Unit Fern slid down from the hood into the driver’s side window and leered around the back carriage at. “At least you smell a little better now.”

Subject V reached over and smeared his hand across her shirt.

**OBSERVATION: **

FROM THE TIME OF ACQUISITION OF THE RESISTANCE VEHICLE, THIS POD HAS NOTED A DECREASE OF 32% IN NEGATIVE COMMUNICATION PATTERNS BETWEEN YORHA UNITS, AND AN OVERALL INCREASE IN COMMUNICATION BETWEEN ALL SUBJECTS. ADDITIONALLY, AN INCREASE IN PHYSICAL INTERACTION HAS BECOME APPARENT. FURTHER OBSERVATION IS REQUIRED.

* * *

** STATUS: OBSERVING SUBJECT V **

** LOCATION: 3 KILOMETERS OFF-ROAD**

** WEATHER: OVERCAST, NO PRECIPITATION **

** TEMPERATURE: 19.3 CELSIUS **

** REPORT FOLLOWS: **

Despite her personal experience with Subject V’s full combat capabilities, Unit Fern often responded negatively to proposals that involved leaving him without an assigned YoRHa. Unlike Unit 49, she had not been required to accustom to spending multiple hours away from Subject V on a daily basis to pursue food and water.

She had displayed none of that hesitance today.

They had arrived at a fork in the road. The map data made the shortest route clear, but the roads were starting to show signs of repair—something which would only correlate to the presence of androids that made frequent use of them. Without any significant disagreement, the YoRHa units had decided to leave V and the vehicle far off-road to scout ahead together.

It was unclear if their unanimity represented an increase in trust or a natural response to the necessity of determining their next course of action. Regardless, Subject V was left alone with Pod 042 to attend for the second time since the expedition began.

Because their location was on solid ground and within substantial woodland cover, the other support units were free to materialize. Unit Griffon took the opportunity to stretch his wings and was presently laughing. The avian unit frequently complained of boredom, and it appeared that even the much more leisurely Unit Shadow experienced a similar need for stimulation. Moving in and out of matter states, she slipped between and around Subject V, holding his cane hostage just beyond his reach.

It came as a surprise to Pod that V endured this treatment with minimal annoyance. And that despite Shadow being approximately 275% faster than Subject V, he persisted in chasing after her.

Pod 042’s processors whirred with the beginnings of a hypothesis. Slowly, he turned toward Unit Griffon.

The impulse might have been a matter of experimentation or mere curiosity, but Pod 042 sank low along the shaded forest floor and weaved stealthily through the bushes without rustling them. He circled around and flew silently up to where the eagle familiar was still cackling at Subject V’s expense. After a brief scan to ensure that there were no additional signals in the immediate area, he reached out and tugged sharply at Unit Griffon’ tail feathers.

A raucous squawk and a string of expletives rewarded Pod 042. “What the heck do you think you’re doing, soda can?!”

“REPORT: THIS IS BELIEVED TO BE THE ACTIVITY KNOWN AS ‘TEASING’.”

“Huh?” Griffon’s feathers bunched, and sparks popped between his horns. “You trying to pick a fight?!”

“NEGATIVE. THIS POD WISHED TO TEST WHETHER PLAY BEHAVIORS INCREASE SOCIAL BONDS.”

To assist the clarification, he pointed down at Subject V and Shadow. Griffon tilted his head and after a moment he shook with a new burst of laughter. “How fuckin’ cute. You that bored that you wanna be play~mates with me?”

When put that way, Pod 042’s interest waned to the point of non-existence.

“REPORT: REGRET.”

“Aw, don’t be shy now,” Unit Griffon leered, in his unique three-beaked way. He shuffled along the branch and threw a wing around Pod. “You know what’s even better than teasing? Playing a prank. And even better than that is teaming up to play a prank on someone else.”

Prank. A noun describing a mischievous action, or a verb for the performance of said action. “QUERY: IS UNIT GRIFFON PROPOSING A COMBINED ATTACK?”

“Sure. Shadow shouldn’t be the only one who gets to tease the boss man, right? We’re all support units and I’ve got a great idea! I’ll even give you a new nickname. You’ll get upgraded from soda can to toaster—toasty for short!”

“REPORT: UNNECESSARY.”

“Course it’s necessary,” Unit Griffon insisted in a placating voice that lacked evident sincerity. “Nicknames are filled with love ya know?”

“UNDERSTOOD. UNIT GRIFFON HAS AN AFFINITY FOR HEATED BREAD PRODUCTS AND CARBONATED BEVERAGES.”

“What? No, not like—look, we’ll come back to that. You wanna play the prank or not?!”

“…AFFIRMATIVE.”

“That’s the spirit, toasty!”

While Pod 042 nursed a faint sensation of doubt, Griffon laid out a plan of attack. It was true that Unit Griffon was the most experienced on the subject of teasing Subject V. Even when he went a little too far and ended up with a cane in his beak, there was never any indication that any true harm was done. The physicality seemed to be a part of the process.

As he drifted back to the truck, Pod found that Subject V’s energy had finally depleted. He climbed into the truck’s cargo bed, and Unit Shadow immediately relinquished the cane and draped herself across his lap.

“Have you not satisfied yourself enough in you bids for my attention?” he asked. It sounded like a reprimand, however, he proceeded to pet Unit Shadow anyway.

It seemed to Pod that it was counterintuitive to reward the very behavior he had just reproached, but perhaps that was also the nature of teasing. The actions were unpleasant or an annoyance if only considered from an objective perspective, yet there was a dual meaning to them not unlike the verbal act known as wordplay. The end result was a physical interaction.

 ** _HYPOTHESIS:_ ** _IF THIS POD ENGAGES IN THE OBSERVED DUPLICITY, THE PRANK WILL BECOME MORE EFFECTIVE._

“REPORT: IT WAS RECOMMENDED THAT THIS POD WAIT UNTIL SUBJECT V’S SLEEP CYCLE TO PAINT RUDIMENTARY SHAPES ON HIS FACE USING ANY STAINING MATERIAL AVAILABLE.” His antenna spun, and after a pause, he added: “AS A PRANK. END REPORT.”

Subject V’s expression emptied to a pensive blank. It was this configuration of his features that signaled he was at his most unpredictable. “And who was it that made this recommendation?”

“SUPPORT UNIT GRIFFON.”

V spun his cane in his left hand, testing the weight and/or the strength of the attached arm. He was beginning to smile in a way Pod 042 had come to associate with danger. The cane took on a violet light, and he threw it with great force over Pod 042’s head and into a nearby tree, where it embedded with a dull but resounding thud approximately 5 inches from where Unit Griffon had been perched.

The offending unit tumbled down and nearly into the bushes. He managed to right himself and flap his way clear, crowing down. “Toasty, you traitor!”

“A wise man avoids the pitfalls of folly.” Subject V rewarded Pod 042 with an affectionate pat atop his case. “Continue to be wise, Pod.”

As far as Pod 042 was concerned, the prompting of a physical interaction represented the successful execution of the prank. He gave a cheerful flex of his digits and settled atop a tire with a distinct feeling of achievement.

* * *

** “STATUS REPORT: VEHICLE UNDERGOING MINOR REPAIRS **

** WEATHER: MISTING PRECIPITATION **

** TEMPERATURE: 20.8 CELSIUS” **

“THIS IS POD 153 TO POD 042—YOU ARE CONDUCTING YOUR RECORDINGS OUT LOUD AGAIN.”

“AFFIRMATIVE,” Pod 042 answered, swiveling inside his stack of tires. “WOULD POD 153 LIKE TO PARTICIPATE?”

“UNABLE TO PARSE STATEMENT. THIS POD HAS ALREADY IDENTIFIED THE ACTION AS REDUNDANT.”

“CORRECTION: WOULD POD 153 LIKE TO SHARE DATA?”

“POD 042 PREVIOUSLY DESIGNATED THE DATA AS UNNECESSARY FOR MISSION OUTCOMES. SHARING IS UNNECESSARY. PLEASE CONDUCT YOUR RECORDINGS IN SILENT MODE.”

Again, there was no change in Pod 153’s mode of expression, yet Pod 042 still perceived a lingering offense, in addition to a certain stubbornness. It was an easy to recognize pattern—having information withheld from him had been the source of significant conflict for Unit 49, and the withholding of it even proved deleterious for Unit 2B. However, pods were not androids. Keeping secrets from the units they were assigned to help, and only communicating with each other when necessary was standard operating procedure.

It had not occurred to him that after entering a state in which their communications were constant, Pod 153 might respond negatively to a partial return to standard protocol. Perhaps under these new conditions, that implied an absence of trust that was not meant. The present tension was the result of misunderstanding; an occurrence Pod had not expected between himself and another Pod, but which he nonetheless desired to clear up.

“THIS POD WILL CONTINUE TO RECORD IN SILENT MODE,” said Pod 042. “HOWEVER, I HAVE ACQUIRED NEW DATA THAT MAY BE OF INTEREST TO POD 153. REQUESTING DATA EXCHANGE.”

“…REQUEST ACCEPTED.”

As he imparted his observations across their local network, a clicking answered—her digits tapping along the truck bed. An odd action. Pod 153 was not given to fidgeting behaviors.

“EXCHANGE COMPLETE,” he reported.

“CONFIRMED.”

The truck shifted and leaned, and water trickled and pooled down the cargo bed’s grooves. Unit Fern cursed faintly, and a hunk of blown-out rubber sailed overhead. Unit 49 sighed a cursory reproach at her forceful methods and pulled a tire from Pod 153’s stack. The cargo bed went quiet again, save a few metallic noises from beneath the rear wheels.

Without the additional cover, Pod 042 noted Pod 153’s digits close into something like fists, open, and close again in slow, repeated waves. The reaction was novel, and Pod 042 could not guess what thought the other support unit was processing. Perhaps sensing that she was being observed engaging in an unusual behavior, she spun away and offered as an afterthought:

“REPORT: …FUNNY."


	6. The Moscow Snap

It lay dormant most of the time now—the entity within V's arm.

It did not have a name despite the occasional address of 'Bones' from the bluebird that sometimes nosed at it. It did not have a shape despite the occasional imaginings of a vast but headless winged beast made of deep red flames that passed through V’s mind.

V only ever thought of it with such abstracts. He called it by no name. As he, within his thoughts, sometimes called himself by no name. ‘V’ was as a placeholder no different from ‘I’, ‘me’, or ‘myself’. It was by chance that the letter had come to mean much more than originally intended. On occasions when he lingered on his past, he sometimes forgot only to cling with renewed possessiveness to the identity that now rode upon that name.

This it perceived, as he perceived.

When V brought it under his will in battle, it knew his mind well. With no immediate threats and his guard ever dropping, less so. Still, nothing that he perceived was ever truly out of its reach.

It saw his frequent dreams. Jarring, violent regurgitations of memory in hues of ash and blood. And other nightmares still, of crumbling. Of death. The drum of his heart filled his world in the moment of waking. V was accustomed to this. He made no outward mention. Nor did he let fear linger in his blood. Instead, in much the same way he reached to assure himself that his weapon was close at hand, he reached inside himself to know the power at his disposal; its own among them.

In V’s less fraught sleep, it saw dreams that were not V’s own. They faded beyond his mind’s reach within moments of his awakening, impersonal to him and thus impermanent. But it could not un-perceive these dreams so easily, no more than it could unknow their sources. V was a crowded man. Full of residues leftover from the consumption of other entities. These scraps were far beneath his conscious notice, but his dreaming mind knew their presence.

So it saw when he dreamed of a young boy crushed and crying beneath the burden of eternity. And when he dreamed of silent flowers shaped like ill omens. Once, he dreamed of a man he did not know, voiceless yet implacable, whose eyes reflected a crimson shape.

It had lingered on this dream.

It saw V’s waking hours too. It knew which poems he often returned to in the book he kept, and which unwritten lines he could summon from memory. That sometimes his mind was full of music (which always brought it uncomfortably to attention). It knew he felt at ease in his company. And that he was frequently off-put by that ease. And that at this very moment he was absorbing precious little of the plans his companions were discussing.

The fine details of the future didn’t interest him. In his mind, he would act when it was time to act, and in the meantime, it was simpler to wait and not worry too much. This, it knew, was his way of not thinking about reaching their destination. Out that way lie his every ambition, yet he considered his success with thoughts so contrary that it could not make sense of them.

It gave a contemptuous lurch in the arm that united them. 

V ignored it.

“The temperature’s been dropping all day,” said the boy who was theirs. “You think we should find someplace to stop?”

“It can only go down so much right? It’s May.” The girl who was not theirs paused. “…But we’re also further north than before. And this truck isn’t gonna do shit to keep him warm if it comes to that. Fuck; tell me how to get back to the main road.”

It saw the gray horizon that V watched while the two went back and forth on where to go, and heard them decide on someplace to the west. The one who was not theirs pulled off to one side of the road and insisted that V eat before they move on. An animal was captured, but the endeavor made it no further.

“ALERT: SUBSURFACE TREMORS DETECTED.”

Battle tension had already flared it to keen awareness before the ground erupted. A metal snake with a drill for a head upended their transport. A dozen of the simpler insect-like machines clawed their way up from the gap in the earth, each with their own oddly placed drill appendages. V spun his cane with lazy arrogance. He knew these enemies, so it too knew these enemies. They were not its match.

 _Flame_ , it threatened.

“Don’t do anything extravagant,” warned the girl.

V did not like this rule. Options flicked through his mind, but few of them were not ‘extravagant’. All the might at his disposal, and in the name of restraint whose purpose it barely understood, he reached for the lowliest thing he had—a gun.

An urgent but unintelligible voice yelled from the nearby cliffs. “ **БЕРЕГИСЬ**!”

The girl snatched both V and the boy under her arms, dived across the road, and rolled them all into a ditch. The air thrummed once, briefly, in a way that V only felt through its physical extension on his body. There was no explosion. Only the clattering of machines on stone, and the grinding of their metal parts.

V watched a small rain of humans fall from a nearby overhang. With great coordination, they surrounded the immobile machines, and impersonally began dismantling them while they still lived.

“EMP bombs?” their boy asked.

It did not know the meaning of this word. Only that it filled V with a tight unease that had nothing to do with his own body. A weapon, it gathered, but one that could only harm his companions. He was not human the way they were human.

“Dangerous,” said the girl. “But real damn efficient if you need parts.”

A large, well-bundled man that V immediately labeled ‘leader’ approached them. His expression was hidden behind bulky, reflective green lenses, and his voice was gruff, but not aggressive. “Из какого сектора вы пришли?”

The girl who was not theirs answered quickly, “Сектор G Восток.”

V watched them conduct their cryptic conversation with an expression of boredom, and the entity likewise gave the prattle no regard. Instead, it focused on the light-footedness of V’s stance and the tension coiled in his shoulders. He was prepared to cut the entire group down if needed. It lent its own dangerous heat toward the cause as a smaller human wagged her gun toward V.

“Что, ты не говоришь?”

“Я могу говорить просто отлично,” their boy snapped, and positioned himself directly in front of V. “Его языковой процессор поврежден. Отвали.”

The girl who was not theirs choked on a burst of laughter that roused V’s curiosity, but quickly regathered herself and barked: “Вести себя!”

“И вам того же,” said the leader, vaguely in their direction. “Опусти пистолет, идиот.”

The weapon lowered. V loosened.

A short while later, the vehicle was righted, and they were on the move once more. With several additional humans and a small collection of machine parts in tow. According to their word, the cold snap was going to worsen. There were usually one or two in this area at this time of year when strong winds from the kingdom of night blew in. The place V’s companions had intended to go was dangerous—one of several maws to a den of machines that moved below ground through most of the area. In exchange for being guided to a place both safe and out of the elements, the humans had requested only the small favor of transport with their spoils.

“Anything beats driving into a machine nest,” said the girl. “But we’re headed to the place we specifically got off the main road to avoid, which means you two need to keep it together. 49, don’t do anything flashy and V… you can just stick to what 49 said.”

“Which was?” V prompted.

“That your language processor is busted.” They rocked into a turn, and she smirked. “He also told that girl to fuck off.”

V coughed out a laugh, and the entity’s still-sharp senses dimmed. Outside, rain began to fall, and the applauding din of hail soon followed.

The place they arrived was not much different from the ruins where the entity had become a part of V. Not so many buildings climbing the sky, but still dense with structures, and a number of humans darted around with their heads down against the worsening weather. Their escort identified their primary place of rest in a red-hued, run-down church.

The inside was faded yet still brutally busy with patterns and reliefs. V reached inside himself, in that self-assuring action he usually only took after his bad dreams, and in the brief meeting of his will against its own, it understood why. The relentless designs reminded him of some plane he had once walked that either preceded or followed the source of his nightmares.

It knew the muffled restlessness he masked as he sought out the smallest, driest, least ornate corner he could put his back to. And knew his irritation when they were bothered almost immediately by an interloper.

The girl once again handled the talking. There was faint admiration in V for how casually she separated from them, leading the other speaker out of the small space as though it were only natural. And fainter still recognition that she must have frequently lured her targets where she wanted them like that—V among them. It grasped that she was no longer an enemy to him but lacked the mind to fathom when or how he’d grown to have such even-tempered thoughts toward her.

V’s conquest against the watchers involved as much exultation as ruthlessness, but she had provoked savagery that it had not perceived in him since.

“Are you hungry?” whispered their boy.

“I’m fine.” This was a lie. “What are they saying?”

“Hmm… Seems like a lot of androids are traveling around these days.” He craned his head toward the conversation just beyond the far wall, translating as it came to him. “He says nothing really changed out here despite the treaty. A few months of quiet, then new machines as hostile as the old ones. This group…This place is all these guys have known for decades or centuries. They want to keep living here, so they’re continuing to fight. Now… Ah, now they’re talking about safe roads and getting gasoline.”

If V felt something toward any of this, even it did not know. The words garnered no reaction, and that composure made his thoughts opaque. As the girl returned, it pressed him more that he shivered where the cold seeped from the stone into his back.

Without a word, his companions sat to either side of him, and exasperation flashed through him as warmth began seeping into his sides. A dozen protests raced to be the first, but he sighed and focused on trying to sleep instead.

In the truck, he sometimes woke up slumped against the one who was theirs. The boy said nothing of this, and neither did V. It was common knowledge that he did not care to be close and could be prickly about being touched. Yet there was a liberation that came with knowing it could not be helped. A means to yield that did not call for him to surrender anything, while still offering him something he desired.

This it perceived, as he perceived, and it might have given another contemptuous shudder at the depths of V’s self-deceit had it not turned its focus inward.

The passively begrudged sharing of heat stirred in it something that did not come from V.

It felt. It _remembered_. But the shape of the memory was as formless as it was aching and it circled itself impatiently, seeking some concise image or impulse within itself that could describe its agitation.

_Humans. Seed. Seal. Song. Memory. Memory. Memory. Memory._

Annoyance clouded its perception. It had no mind. It could not think without borrowing from V, and V could not sleep with it churning so. His will was gentler than usual as he impressed quiet upon it. Softened despite the hunger in his gut and the hard, uncomfortable stone beneath him. He settled someplace on its amorphous essence with strange familiarity.

Like the ghost of a sword-calloused palm touching a memory of red scales.

Its anxiety faded. It curled around this imagery, content to return with it to dormancy while V’s companions steamed strangely at his sides and drove the chill from his body. Soon, V slept. A rare untroubled sleep brought on by an even rarer certainty that, at least for a while, he was safe. Whispers of warmth that had little to do with temperature rippled along the surface of his mind.

Disjointedly, it wove a thought through those ripples. Small, but complete. Maybe it would only be as a quickly forgotten dream that he heard it at all.

_I, too… am warmed._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Somehow I just keep coming back to with androids that are set to Russian default language.


	7. Monastyryshche

Even when I knew I was doing it just to kill them, getting close to other people without putting at least a little truth into the act was impossible for me. It was something I started worrying about right around my fifth or sixth assignment. I thought it had to mean I was giving too much away or revealing myself in a way that was going to impede my mission. As I watched my twelfth assignment waste her last breaths choking on the name she’d given me as if that would make sense of what I’d done, I realized it made me excellently suited to being an infiltration-based Executioner.

It didn’t matter what the individual’s tastes were. A grain of sincerity and a glimpse of vulnerability and voila: defenses were down. It gave off the impression I was trying to be brave. I was, of course. But the thing was that all androids were trying to be brave. Faltering didn’t so much appeal to their sympathies as it appealed to the kind of miserable solidarity we all had in common, and it never crossed any of their minds that I was trying to be brave about a different but equally shitty duty.

I learned to lean into it.

What I didn’t learn was how to deal with being affected by that same sincerity when it wasn’t all tangled up in lies. My targets knew peeks at the real thing. I, on the other hand, got a pretty good look into most of them. Some of them had gone cold, and some were warm; some couldn’t get as close as they wanted to me, and others welcomed me into their arms in ways I couldn’t keep and never felt I deserved.

A couple of them were so bright inside I would catch myself staring at something beautiful and remembering them long after they were dead.

And today was a terribly beautiful day.

Taking smaller and more obscure side roads, we’d ended up in the middle of nowhere out on the edge of Sector F. The mountains had given way to hills so lazy they couldn’t be bothered to roll—they just flowed vaguely between equally modest altitudes. Tall, skinny trees pocked the terrain, occasionally in forest clusters full of noisy birds. The sunlight was starting to take on a barely perceptible tint and the shadows had grown long, but summer warmth was on the air. A pleasant breeze wafted in from the east under a sky without a single cloud.

There were no signs that civilization had ever been out there, but there were signs of war. Small pools with muted rainbows of pollution slicking the surface. Machines dropped in place with their external casing rusted through, exposing their innards like petrified animal bones that no predator could eat. A small abandoned camp in the shade of a rock formation half-hidden by how high the grasses had grown around it.

49 gingerly pinched at the remains of a tarp fluttering in the wind. “Nothing here either.”

I hummed without any real thought behind it, just to let him know I was listening.

“I don’t want to go too much further…” He turned back the way we’d come. “We might just have to accept we’re finally out of gas.”

That was a risk we understood when we started driving on back roads. Not the end of the world. “Let’s head back then. We’ll take a break once we get V back here since at least we know the area’s clear and we can use this spot as a camp.”

He nodded and mumbled over his shoulder. “Pod, mark this spot on my map, would you?”

A click from inside his pack provided non-verbal affirmation.

Our internal maps of the area weren’t very good. Not that they needed to be since there wasn’t anything out here. A herd in the distance milled along, chewing at the yellow-green grass without paying us any mind and that was about as much excitement as we’d seen since we left V to scout ahead.

Something had been on my mind for most of the trip, but to ask was to offer up that all-important grain of sincerity to someone I wasn't planning to kill while my own death was several months away at best. Most of my nastier truths were already out in the open with him, but those weren’t personal to me. This was.

I opened my mouth.

“We’re almost to Sector E-H, right?” asked 49. “Do we need dog tags?”

Dammit. “What for?”

“32S’ description of androids in the central H sectors said almost all of them wore dog tags.”

“32S has actually been to that area? Like, personally?”

“It was during the Normandy salvage missions. He had a habit of being overly helpful with the Resistance so he was always getting hurt to keep them safe or going somewhere he wasn’t required to.”

My thought routines stuttered. Without acknowledging the sickly drilling pain moving through my gut, I said the first innocuous small-talk string of words I could put together. “Bet he wasn’t popular with the Healers.”

49’s smile was wistful, and his voice wasn't fully steady. “Probably not.”

For a few moments, there was only the crunch of our boots in the grass and the slow, inaudible unclenching of my stomach.

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea,” I said, eventually. “But tags are personal. You know what they’re for?”

“Identification,” he answered quickly. “Common androids have unit addresses, but those aren’t easy to read after death like YoRHa ID circuits, so they use an external accessory. Humans soldiers used to wear them, so androids just adopted the system.”

He sounded pleased. Scanner-typical chatter was a luxury while he pretended to be a regular android.

“You know why there’s usually more than one copy?” He slowly shook his head. “It’s so their friends can take one off the corpse to remember them by. They’re ID, sure, but it’s way more important that they’re mementos.” I laughed, but it had the same watery quality as 49’s ‘probably not’. “Apparently once you get centuries old, you start to not remember everything even if your components are all intact and you have plenty of unused memory storage.”

“We probably…should leave them then, right?” He receded briefly into his own thoughts. “…If we found any, I mean.”

“Yeah. We’re only a few years old. We can get away with not having any.”

He didn’t say anything else. The breeze sighed by.

I’d learned the hard way that it was sometimes harder to have a conversation with 49 than it was to have one with V. That same framework that let us work together so fast also created a weird, rigid distance between us. Or maybe that was just me and I only felt that way now because I actually wanted to talk to him.

I opened my mouth again. Hesitated. Tried to be brave.

“So when you met V did you also have that thought that you wanted to kill him?”

Suddenly my boots were the only ones crunching down the slope. My jaw tightened. I stopped and waited, and when no answer came, I gritted my teeth and turned to face 49, ready to find him with his weapon drawn.

Instead, I found him standing there like a startled deer. His shirt was puffed up where his auxiliary vents had opened wide to vent excess heat.

“Oh.” My voice sounded far away and numb. “So it wasn’t just because I’m an E model.”

“Was that what you thought?”

“What the hell else was I supposed to think?” He didn’t come up with a retort for that. I wished he had. I was full of strange, buzzing energy. “What was it like for you?”

“Well, I mean—” he floundered. “I’d just found out he was human, so I was really overwhelmed. And I was in bad shape. I dunno if I wanted to _kill_ him, exactly, but I did end up taking him somewhere I thought he’d get hurt.”

Passive-aggressive, but I still counted it. He wasn’t designed for combat; of course he wouldn’t think to do it with his own hands. “It didn’t feel fair, right?”

“I—yeah? It was like I had to keep going because he was right in front of me and my protocols wouldn’t shut the hell up even though I was so tired. I was this close to being…” His lips pressed thin, and he let the obvious ending hang.

Dead. He was close to finally being dead after losing everything and learning everything and his reaction to a human yanking him back onto his feet was the same as mine was. Relief spilled through me like fresh coolant. That moment of sharp, visceral desire to kill him, which had been so much more intense than even my later desire to be killed _by_ him, was… normal. Still fucked up, but it had nothing to do with me being an executioner. Hell, it wasn't even because I was a combat type. I was so light all of a sudden. I felt like I’d won.

Wasn’t sure _what_ I won, but I was too keen on enjoying it while it lasted to get hung up on details like that.

* * *

Passing over those sluggish hills, we made it back to the woods we’d come from. Our pace was brisk, but it was a walk rather than a run. He wasn’t anxious or in a rush, and for once, neither was I. Maybe that was why something familiar caught my eye that I hadn’t noticed when we passed that way the first time. A pop of color of the forest floor between the stretched shadows of the trees.

“What’s up?” 49 asked as I slowed down.

I shuffled over and squatted in front of an overgrown berry patch, prodding at the serrated leaves that hid tiny, white flowers and fruit barely bigger than a fingernail. “These were growing in the castle before we left. V was busy trying to make nice with the dragon at the time, but he seemed interested in them.”

“Are they edible?”

“Dunno.” I remembered the small berries the previous Fern had ended up throwing away in a fit of frustration the moment she began to realize that she might want more than merely being useful. Those berries were pink. These were red as drops of blood. I picked one and held it up to the light, staring at all the little bumps along its surface. “I don’t think they were ripe back then.”

“They look pretty ripe now…” He bent over, looking at the berry with his hands on his knees. “Try it.”

“Huh?" My face scrunched. "Why the hell would I do that?”

“Meat is meat and plants are plants,” he said with a weirdly energetic smile. “But you sort of have to taste fruit to know if it’s really any good.”

I stared at him and his obnoxiously glowy smile, my lips slowly curling back as I leaned away from him. “Oh my God, were you _eating_ those oranges back in the grove? Even the old me didn’t think about eating V’s food. What are you, one of those humanity fetishists?”

“Hey, he gave it to me! And I—! Wait, wait, what the heck is a humanity fetishist?!”

I hooted so hard I nearly lost my balance. “Can’t wait to wow you with the answer to that question, but that’s another lesson for another time. Come on, we're almost there.”

V was lounging in the back of the truck when we made it back. As he usually was now that the weather was good. I still found it weird a guy who'd gotten into so much shit in the weeks between meeting me and leaving the ruins could be good at lazing around. I could see the handle of his cane moving in an idle rocking motion. His voice was a low, pleasant rumble beneath the sound of the breeze in the canopy.

“ _I see those lights among the leaves; yourselves I see, sedate and wise. And yet some finer sense perceives… a presence that eludes the eyes.”_

I hoisted myself up over the trick wall. Instead of his book, he was holding a flower in one hand. I smirked. “You reciting your poetry to plants now?”

9S poked his head up beside me. “Hm? Oh, that's...! Where’d you manage to find a lunar tear?”

The cane moved in a circular gesture to the woods around us and V sat up. “I gather your search was not so fruitful.”

“We didn't find any gas, no.” I tossed the little red berry I’d plucked into his lap. “But it wasn't totally fruit _less_.”

He stared down at it like he couldn’t decide whether his assuredly smartmouthed reply should be about the joke or the circumstances that had me carrying around exactly one berry. 49, meanwhile, actually laughed as he rounded to the other side of the truck.

“That was awful,” he groaned. “I thought 42S was the only one who made jokes that bad!”

“You’re the only one laughing,” I pointed out, and gave the truck two quick raps. “Let’s get packed up and get moving.”

As I stepped down, I happened to glance back at V.

Over the growing expanse of summer that separated us from the city ruins, he’d somehow become even less expressive than before. Bored, preoccupied, and vaguely annoyed were his general moods; everything else was an outlier at this point. So to see the smile he cracked at that tiny red berry completely devoured my attention. It was crooked, a smile wearing a smirk's angles, but it reached his eyes revealingly.

It was the way I smiled sometimes, when I caught myself remembering difficult things on beautiful days. Private and amused and a little hurt. I knew 49 reminded him of his kid back at home, but I wondered just who it was he was thinking of as he ate it.

“How is it…?” I asked.

“Strawberry,” he answered matter-of-factly, and I knew it was an important detail in a story about him that I didn’t know. “It’s sweet.”

He looked my way. Maybe it was the good weather or the flower or whoever he was thinking of, but he didn’t bother putting his guard back up.

I was bad at remaining unaffected when other people showed me glimpses of themselves without any pretext or intent. Twenty-two targets, and thirteen names and I’d never learned.

And it was such a terribly beautiful day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *taps the mic* I love 8E. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
> 
> PS: V is reciting another Thomas Bailey Aldrich poem.


	8. Hot Spring Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spoiler: It's not sexy, but it is silly, and V is so done with his robot children.

The rain that had plagued so much of the early journey was gone. The sky was clear as a summer dream, with only the occasional passing herd of puffy clouds to be seen, and the sun was a little lower in the western sky every day.

West being the direction of their travel, meaning the incessant glare quickly rose through the ranks of V's travel-related nemeses. Mercifully, it was one defeated easily with the sunglasses 9S had found before they began this trek. It was time for him to get used to hiding his lack of optic lights anyway. 

If only the heat were so easy to alleviate.

Their route had turned marginally south to keep away from increasing clusters of androids and keep close to water sources. Somewhat paradoxically, it also brought them closer to the desertification that had claimed the planet’s equator and was steadily encroaching outward. Open prairie had yielded to hills covered in destroyed forests only just beginning to regrow saplings and finally to scrubland. Fern gave some explanation about a series of high-carnage descent missions in advance of the one-sided loss that was the battle of Normandy, but V barely heard it.

The terrain was aggressively barren of shade. Even with the breeze that came from speeding along with Shadow underfoot and bare minimum resistance clothing, the temperature was stifling. He hadn’t felt so wretched since he was actually dying.

It only grew worse when scrub gave way to a red-hued expanse so sterile it may as well have been on Mars. Treads of boots and tires scuffled and danced around one another in the dust. Buildings more unsettling than anything the machines had ever restored pocked the landscape. High rises standing at strange uneven distances from one another without roads or concrete or any other infrastructure. They were strangely well maintained despite their blown-out windows and the absence of any place the white material that made their façades would have come from. On and on they stretched, despite days of travel, like strange markers in a graveyard that may not have been as abandoned as they hoped.

With that alien terrain came the dust storms, a worse enemy than the rain had ever been.

The air in the distance would rise in ruddy clouds and they’d have half an hour at best to get to the nearest of the unsettling white-paneled monoliths. The storms posed as much danger to the androids as to V himself, so they were forced to rest the same as he was while it passed. They likely didn’t mind. The heat didn’t slow them down much, but V had noticed both of them audibly huffing after the first two or three hours on the move. Invariably, they would fall asleep within minutes of hunkering beneath their mantles while the inescapable grit hummed over them, and V was rarely far behind.

V awoke from one of these dusty naps to the jolt of Shadow's cold nose pressing against his cheek. He didn’t mind. Nor did he mind the bottle that followed. He’d become accustomed to lukewarm water pulled from little trickling streams that didn’t suffer from pollution. The water in the bottle tasted like rocks but was cold enough to make the bottle sweat in the heat even after he’d emptied it.

Fern stood over him with a wide, roguish grin and hiked a thumb over her shoulder. “Wanna get out of the heat for a bit?”

He followed her without question or retort out to a dry gorge that looked like it went to the center of the Earth. They descended down into the dark, hugging the smooth, banded walls. Before it could grow dark enough to call for a pod, light began to ripple along the walls in swaying rays, and what had become a tight tunnel opened into a cave. A wide lake of crystal-clear water stretched before them. 49 waved from the other side, where the light was passing through from some other point of entry. V flung his cloak, gloves, and cane aside, sank down at the lake’s edge and tossed water over his face. The cave wasn’t as cold as the water, but it was cool enough to be a relief.

He noted 49’s boots placed neatly by a stalagmite. “Shallower than it looks, I take it?”

Fern kicked off her own boots, rolled up her pants, and stepped in. “Except for those dark spots, yeah. Shallow and cold and not so much as a single machine fish. Not any regular fish either, but hey, nothing’s perfect.”

She squatted down and sucked in water with all the noisy urgency of an unfed calf. V clenched his eyes and tried to remember he might seriously damage her by throwing her bodily into the water, however much he hated that sound. “I thought you didn’t need to do that.”

“I don’t. It’s just a secondary measure to refresh my coolant system. Don’t really want to do it the right way and expose my components to all this fucking dust.” To emphasize her point, she fluffed her fingers through her hair, shaking free a rusty cloud. “Kid’s been doing the same. YoRHa clothes might’ve looked flashy, but the fabric was designed for thermal regulation. Gotta mitigate any way we can now that we’re going without.”

He glanced out to where 49 was wading his way over to them. “…How have your filters been holding up?”

“So you do know a little something about android functionality. Color me surprised.” With a smug grin, (and a split-second of hesitation which she then overcorrected for) she clapped his shoulder. “Don’t worry. We’re taking care of each other.”

V wondered if she realized how big a shift in her thinking those words indicated. Not that he intended to ask. Or that he had time to with 49 splashing toward him with the high, flopping steps of a puppy in slightly-too-deep water.

“Come to the other side,” he called with bright-eyed excitement. “I found something you’re really gonna like!”

V’s head lolled back. He couldn’t imagine something better than the shade and the cold water and he didn’t want to get up. But 49 was more than qualified to make judgment calls about what V would like. If he was that enthusiastic about it...

With a long-suffering roll of his eyes, he heaved himself back upright. 49 guided him across the lake and down three passages where the faint light bounced from so many corridors away it was unlikely even the dust storms made it there. The temperature of the air changed. The stones grew slick in places and lichens clung to the floor here and there. An unpleasant but momentary rotted egg stench made him pause, but all that lie around the last bend was a dimly lit pool of clouded, faintly green water.

49 beamed from its edge. “It’s a hot spring!”

“Hot spring?” Fern poked her head around V and just as quickly recoiled away, wagging her hand in front of her face. “Why’s it stink?”

“Sulfur,” V and 49 answered simultaneously. 49 went on, proudly: “V’s been trying to get a hot bath since he got here.”

V weaved between both of them and stooped at the water’s edge. Hot, but not near-boiling. The color was a bit off-putting, and the cloudiness more so, but the stink was rather mild. He’d already stopped noticing it.

“Why didn’t you just use a machine torso?” asked Fern. “V could practically swim in a goliath.”

“That’s kinda dark…”

No tingling on his skin. Good enough. The spring was shallow, just like it’s cold neighbor, and it couldn’t have been more than a few meters across at best. Truly, nothing was perfect, but he was well beyond needing it to be.

“We use them for all types of shit, why is _that_ dark?”

“I don’t know, it’s just different!”

“If you two are done?” V interrupted, glaring over his shoulder.

“Yeah, yeah."

Fern wasn’t as quick to catch on. Her head swiveled between 49 as he passed back around the bend and V climbing back upright at the pool's edge. “Wait are you actually getting in? Why would you want to get in hot water when you’ve been sweating your ass off for the past two weeks?!”

Perhaps sensing V had neither the energy nor patience to explain, 49 grabbed Fern by her shirt and hauled her out of sight.

Moments later, V’s clothes were tossed aside, and his cane was leaned carefully against the wall. He slipped in with only the scantest sigh and relaxed almost faster than he was prepared for, sinking bonelessly until he was nearly on his back. The spring suffused him in an opulent heat that evaporated even the memory of discomfort. It left no room for him to do anything but forget himself and melt.

Only vaguely did he hear the voices from the next corridor over. “What are you doing?”

“I haven’t had a bath in a long time. Probably even longer than V.”

“You really are a humanity fetishist...”

“It’s not about doing it because humans did it! It just feels nice.”

49 rounded the bend and crept around the side of the pool. In underwear. Which raised a few questions that V didn’t care to ask and would like to have never formed in the first place. “You _cannot_ think I’ll agree to this.”

“Agree to what?” 49 asked blithely. “Humans made communal bathing spaces of out hot springs, didn’t they? It’s not like I can see anything since the water’s all cloudy anyway, but I’ll keep my distance. It’ll be fine.”

Before V managed more than a weary glower in response, Shadow seeped from his tattoos into the water with barely a splash. She draped herself across 49 with a self-satisfied look and a deep purr. V wasn’t sure if he considered her a traitor or if she was illustrating the source of his irritation. Given 49 didn’t seem to mind, V leaned more toward the former.

Of course, where there was unfavorable behavior already grating on V’s nerves, Griffon was sure to appear. “ _It’ll be fine_ ,” he leered in imitation of 49 as he floated by on his back. “Share the wealth, V~”

Perhaps it was the spring sapping the sharpness of his temper, but he relented. The occasion was too rare to waste, the jokes and troublesome lack of common sense aside. He leaned his head back against a stone, closed his eyes, and made the effort to ignore the splashing around him.

"Hey, watch it, toasty!"

"WARNING: THIS POD IS DESIGNATED 153 AND 153 **ONLY**. POD UNIT 042 IS OVER THERE."

“REPORT: PLEASANT.”

So even the pods now. Of course.

To V’s left, 49’ made a strange remark with an inquisitive lilt. “I didn’t know you were outfitted.”

“I’m surprised you even know what that means,” Fern’s voice answered from his right. Accusations of fetishism and confusion at the concept of a hot bath in hot weather were not more important than being left out, apparently. “It’s not like I was hiding it, you just always turn around when I’m doing anything with my plating. Where’d you get that habit anyway?”

“Pascal told me I should do that with female model types since my model type is male.”

“Hm. Weird.”

“I would have liked to meet Pascal,” V said, knuckling slowly at one of his temples. “At least then, I would have met someone with accurate insight into human custom.”

“Machines _are_ the ones who replicate everything you guys did even though they don’t even look like you,” Fern said matter-of-factly. "Not our fault you didn't build us with that level of imitation in mind."

He shot her the same look of tired irritation he’d given 49. And like with 49, a dozen questions he would have liked to not conceive bubbled to the front of his mind. Only this time a single answer to a question he hadn’t to asked came as well: ‘outfitted’ meant 'anatomically correct'. V struggled not to laugh. With that new context, their conversation was utterly exhausting in every sense of the word, and he had no strength for anything but helpless, feeble amusement. She was only half-submerged and 49 didn't look at her any different, but he would give her some privacy if she had to get at the plates underneath her skin. Was that what it meant to be courteous this far into the future?

“V,” 49 called. “You ok?”

“Just _fine._ ”

Fern laughed and propped her arms up over the edge of the pool. “Real convincing, V. Are you embarrassed or something? It’s not like any of it is functional. You like art—just think of me like a statue or something.”

How charmingly nostalgic to be reassured about something he didn’t care about in the slightest. “You must realize you are more alive than a statue.”

She blinked a few times, like she wasn’t sure how to take that, and eventually gave a slow shrug. “Same principle though, isn’t it? Humans had intimate engagements for reproduction, but it’s not like androids are capable of that.”

Keen judgment lost against the crescendo of his half-stressed, half-amused annoyance. “Then for what reason do any of you bother to be ‘outfitted’ at all?”

“I mean… In my case, it’s a means of getting closer to a target since it’s not an uncommon modification among resistance androids. They mostly get it for recreation.”

The moments passed with nothing but Griffon snickering while both androids looking bewildered, and it became clear that the obvious connection was not going to click. V's lips pursed as he considered belaboring the point. He didn't. Unwilling, unable, and frankly disinterested in pursuing the subject further than that, he offered only a flat "I see."

Their unspoken point was made. They were androids. Intelligent, robust, and in many ways even more clueless than demons. But there hadn't been a human on the planet in ten thousand years and there'd be none for another ten thousand and more once he was gone. Nothing would be accomplished teaching them things they didn't need to know, and being so pointlessly similar to humans had done them enough damage as it was.

 _When in Rome..._ He sank until all but his head was submerged and quietly gave up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The android behavior in this chapter is brought to you by a line in-game where 9S says, and I quote:  
> "Human-shaped weapons, huh? Wonder if they worked like flight units." 
> 
> Completely missing that EVERYONE HE KNOWS IS A HUMAN-SHAPED WEAPON.


	9. Flowers on the Rhine

**Pod 153:** THIS IS POD UNIT 153 TO POD UNIT 042. REQUESTING EXCHANGE.

 **Pod 042:** …

 **Pod 153:** REPEAT: POD 153 TO POD 042. A RESPONSE TO THE EXCHANGE REQUEST IS REQUIRED.

 **Pod 042:** …

 **Pod 153:** …  
**Pod 153:** SODA CAN.

 **Pod 042:** …?  
**Pod 042:** THIS IS POD 042. COMMUNICATION REQUEST ACCEPTED. IS SOMETHING WRONG?

 **Pod 153:** POD 042 HAS BEEN SPORADICALLY ENTERING PERIODS OF LOW ACTIVITY AND REDUCED RESPONSIVENESS.  
**Pod 153:** PROPOSAL: POD 042 SHOULD RUN DIAGNOSTICS AND ALLOW THIS POD TO CONDUCT ANY NECESSARY REPAIRS.

 **Pod 042:** THIS POD HAS NOT SUSTAINED DAMAGE. THEREFORE, WOULD IT NOT WASTE RESOURCES TO PERFORM THIS ACTION?

 **Pod 153:** AFFIRMATIVE. HOWEVER, IF THERE HAS BEEN NO DAMAGE TO POD 042, WHAT IS THE REASON FOR THE RECENT PROCESSING DELAY?

 **Pod 042** : …  
**Pod 042:** …  
**Pod 042:** tomorrow is 26 june 11946

 **Pod 053:** NO MENTION OF THIS DATE IDENTIFIED IN PROTOCOLS. THIS DATE DOES NOT APPEAR TO BE SIGNIFICANT.

 **Pod 042:** this pod does not agree with this assessment  
**Pod 042:** the bunker fell on this date  
**Pod 042:** project yorha entered the final phase on this date  
**Pod 042:** the formation of tower was on this date  
**Pod 042** : on this date…  
**Pod 042:** …  
**Pod 042:** thought routines currently unclear. proposal: pod 153 should continue to provide support for 49, fern, and v

 **Pod 153:** WHAT ABOUT YOU, POD 042?

 **Pod 042:** …  
**Pod 042:** I’LL BE FINE.

* * *

‘ **Fine** ’ (adj.) - An expression frequently used to deter further discussion, especially of subjects which might otherwise cause psychological discomfort. Unit 49 had been using this term with some frequency for the past few days despite increasingly irrational behavior.

“We can’t just leave them...!”

“That signal density suggests otherwise. There’s too many machines and we’re too close to Normandy to blow our cover on a losing battle. Don’t be stupid.”

The most current manifestation of Unit 49’s mounting emotional distress was the present argument. Active machine lifeform and android signals had been identified 1.2 kilometers north of their position. Screams of rupturing metal and the rapid burst reports of automatic rifle fire reached them, echoing over the un-repaired remains of metropolitan infrastructure. Unit 49 wanted to assist, Unit Fern did not, and Pod 153 agreed with the latter. 

“How can you just walk away and let them die?!”

“How the fuck do you think," Fern said icily. "Let’s go.”

Unit 49 did go, just not in the direction Fern was suggesting. He took off at speed, and Pod 153 jostled noisily against Pod 042 as the backpack snagged on something. The full weight of Unit 49 crashed down onto her as he fell onto his back. He tried to get up, but almost immediately sank back into the soft, rocky soil. 

Pod 153 poked her antenna up to acquire visuals, and to no surprise saw it was V that had pinned 49 to the ground with nothing but the head of the cane. He lay there without resistance while his chest hitched and heaved to vent his increasing heat output. 

“Nines,” said V. “What’s the problem?”

“I…” Unit 49 brought his hands up and pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes, his fingers hooking through his hair. His voice cracked unsettlingly when he spoke, and Pod 153 began silently running diagnostic routines. He hadn't sounded like that in a long time. “I don’t want to see anyone die today. I _can’t_.”

“Hm... You know what to do.” Words directed at support unit Griffon, who materialized on V's shoulder. “We will rendezvous elsewhere.”

He removed the cane from 49's chest and joined Fern where she fumed tense-jawed ahead of them. The group marched on together but in heavy silence. From the backpack, Pod 153 observed Griffon’s flight path and watched lightning rain down from the cloudless sky.

xxx

Griffon caught up with them nearly an hour later as they sat by the riverside under the cover of several half-destroyed goliaths tinted yellow by the declining sun. The argument and subsequent conclusion had created a now-unusual physical distance that left them spread over a wide area. Subject V sat atop a machine corpse flipping through his book, the turn of the pages the only interruption to the sounds of crickets and the occasional splash. Unit Fern stood in the light like an angry statue, her arms tightly crossed as she glared everywhere but at them. In the lengthy shadows cast by the rushes, 49 sat curled up at the river’s edge. Pod 042 was safely submerged in the process of fishing, but Pod 153 suspected that none of them had noticed he’d gotten stuck in the reeds almost twenty minutes ago.

“Yeesh,” said Griffon. “Tough crowd.”

A pebble zipped by Griffon’s horns, just barely missing them. Fern jutted a finger at him. “Get back in your fucking tattoos.”

“Fern…” 49 said weakly. “Don’t take this out on Griffon.”

“You’re lucky I don’t take it out on you.” Above, V cleared his throat, but Unit Fern whirled on him with a stormy-eyed snarl. “You shut the hell up too! You shouldn't have enabled him!”

“No one saw us,” said V. “Relax.”

“Even if nobody saw _us_ , a blue eagle is the kind of thing that’ll stand out and get talked about. Do either of you actually care about the reasons you came this far? Or has this been a big continental joyride that you’re willing to fuck up on a whim?!”

“Fern, _stop_ ,” 49 pleaded, dragging his fingers over his face. “I’m sorry. I'm sorry, so please... don’t fight.”

Fern exhaled a short, angry huff. Her temper stemmed, albeit not by much. “What the hell is up with you lately? And don’t say ‘nothing’ or ‘I’m fine’; I’m beyond not in the mood.”

49 struggled to answer. So Pod 053 did it for him.

“REPORT: IN ELEVEN MINUTES, IT WILL BE JUNE 26, 11946, 12:00 AM BUNKER TIME. THIS DATE CORRESPONDS TO THE COLLAPSE OF THE BUNKER DURING THE PREVIOUS YEAR.”

Fern looked down at Pod's antenna poking from the pack, then at 49. “Alright. That definitely answers that.” Turning away, she tugged her fingers through her hair and down over her jaw, cursing beneath her breath. She looked up and away at the part of the sky that was still a pale but darkening blue. “If you need to cry or something then whatever, I don’t care, but we’ve come too far for you to stop thinking straight. Remember what you’re here for. The both of you.”

“How can you be so…” 49 stared with knitted brows at the passing ripples. “Doesn’t it bother you at all?”

“Not really. I wasn’t exactly myself when the Bunker went down. And I probably would have laughed if I was. All I ever wanted…” She stopped herself and crossed her arms even more tightly than before. “Doesn’t matter. I’m sorry the other YoRHa are dead, but I don’t miss the place.”

“Don’t you ever miss anyone from the ground?”

“Sure. But What’s the use of getting so bent out of shape because it’s the same time of year they died? I was the one who killed them to begin with. Even if I deserved to commemorate them, it’s unnecessary grief.”

“Next you’ll say emotions are prohibited,” 49 grumbled, his fists balling against his knees. “It is necessary. I know it is.”

Fern rolled her eyes and looked up at V. “Something you taught him, Shakespeare?”

“I suppose." A page flipped. "Though I agree with you more so, in principle.”

“…You do?”

He leaned back, his expression invisible between the deep shadows, his dark hair, and the reflective sunglasses. “I do not recall the date my mother died. Either that information was cut away when I came to be, or Vergil lost that memory in the chaos that followed the fire. I never tried to remember or to commemorate anything. Not even my own birthday. I had to be without her or the home I had grown up in. As you say, it was grief enough.”

Fern remained quiet, seemingly stunned that V agreed with her despite the wounded face 49 was making. She made a vague gesture. “Uh… There you have it, I guess.”

“Do not be hasty. I never said 49 was wrong.” He pointed his cane vaguely toward Fern. “You always warn me against thinking androids are the same as humans. What is worse—to remember, or to forget?”

A rhetorical question, Pod 153 registered, but one that had its place with both YoRHa. Fern, who couldn’t stand to remember, and 49, who had been forced to forget, would inevitably come to different conclusions. She wondered what their answers might be, but they did not offer, so she did not ask.

"Commemoration does not mean the same things between us." V closed his book and slid down to join them at the water’s edge. “When I return, I might like to choose a date to stand before my mother’s grave.”

“Why?" 49 asked timidly. "What's so different now?”

“I want to remember her. And there is... much more I wish to say that she will never hear.” 

Pod 153’s antennae spun in slow, thoughtful circles, and she crept from the backpack, floating low along the dust.

“Hey," Fern hissed. "Where are you going?!”

“THIS DATE ALSO MARKS ONE YEAR SINCE THE DEATH OF UNIT 2B.” She pulled Pod 042 from where he'd become stuck among the rushes. “IS THIS THE REASON FOR POD 042’S RECENT LAPSE IN FUNCTION?”

Pod 042 stalled momentarily, swiveled, and slowly flexed his claws. “…THIS POD HAD BEEN ASSIGNED TO UNIT 2B SINCE ACTIVATION, AND AS SUCH, I RETAIN A LOG OF ALL SAID UNIT’S ACTIVITY. RECENTLY I HAVE BEEN OCCUPIED WITH PROBABILITY MODELS OF WHAT NEW ACTIVITIES I MIGHT HAVE RECORDED IF SHE HAD SURVIVED.”

“Pod 042…” 49 shuffled over and knelt beside them. “You... You _miss_ 2B?”

“…affirmative. subject v is correct. i find i have messages i would like to relay to unit 2b, despite her absence.” He sank down until he rested in the mud. “there is a greater than zero possibility of failure, or of this pod’s destruction along the way. it is not possible to predict accurately what will happen. but i would like to see unit 2B again. i would…like to say ‘I am sorry’.”

“You did your best to support her, 042.”

“negative. this pod was complicit in enforcing the execution of unit 9s despite the deleterious effect on unit 2b’s psychological state and personal data. i have come to understand the pain this task caused her.”

Comforting a pod was not within Unit 49's skill set. He looked to Pod 153, but she had no experience comforting one of her own kind either. None of them had ever needed comfort before. She turned to Subject V. Neither a proposal or a request was issued, but he seemed to pick up on her expectation. 

He sighed and dug around in his pocket until he found the lunar tear he'd plucked some weeks back. He dropped it in Pod 042's claws with a carelessness that would have made Pod 153 roll her eyes, had she had any. 

"If you are concerned you will not live to make your confession, best to send it along now."

Pod 042 lurched up out of the mud, his antenna whirring with slow deliberation as he observed the slightly crumpled flower. "report: the probability of this reaching unit 2b is effectively 0%"

“That is correct. But I've come to know that is not the point.”

"...UNDERSTOOD." His digits closed gently around the white petals. "PLEASE EXCUSE ME."

He half-submerged himself back into the river, skimming out to the deeper waters to be alone with whatever further words he wished to say. 

Fern sighed loudly. "Guess I'm the one whose on food duty then if y'all are doing this. No more heroics while I'm gone, alright?"

49 nodded somewhat sheepishly, and V gave a dismissive acknowledgement and wandered back to the drier parts of the riverbank. Down in the rushes, Pod 153 and Unit 49 were alone. 

She wondered briefly if 49 would also find flowers to offer, but it was an unlikely outcome. Everything he might have wanted to say, he most likely had already said to Unit 2B's body before leaving the City Ruins. If there was more than that, as Pod 153 was sure there must be, it would be things he wanted to say to the living 2B if they were successful in restoring her. 

It was strange to watch Pod 042 release the flower to the river's current. They had always had personalities and thought routines of their own, but increasingly Pod 153 was aware of both of them doing and wanting things that didn’t have to do with the reason they were created. If Pod 042’s grief represented his growing will, what was it, precisely, that represented her own?

Her antennae whirred, and she clasped all her sets of fine claws together. Though her dimensions had not changed, she felt small. “QUERY: DO YOU EXPERIENCE HATRED TOWARD PODS 042 AND 153 FOR OUR RESPONSIBILITY WITHIN YORHA?”

Beside her, Unit 49 jolted. “Huh? Why would I?”

“WE ARE AN INTEGRAL ASPECT OF THE YORHA PLAN. WE PRESIDED OVER NEARLY ALL OF YOUR DEATHS. WHEN 2B SHOWED RESISTANCE OR HESITANCE, WE ENFORCED HER DESTRUCTION OF YOUR BODY. I…WOULD HAVE LEFT YOU FOR DEAD IN THE RAVINE IF POD 042 DID NOT INTERCEDE.”

His mouth pressed thin as he gave the information its due consideration. “Did you really have a choice?”

“PROTOCOL IS PROTOCOL. THE AGREEMENT OR DISAGREEMENT OF A SINGULAR POD UNIT IS IRRELEVANT.”

“Then I’d say if anything you had even less of a choice than any of us. I mean, you weren’t even made to think about it that much, and you still ended up going through so much trouble, and now you’re with me to try and fix the problem.” He tugged her in close against his chest and rested his cheek atop her case. “I don’t hate you, Pod.”

This was not his standard way of expressing physical affection, but Pod 153 found she didn’t feel like suggesting that he suspend the activity. “THEN, THIS POD WOULD LIKE TO CONTINUE PROTECTING UNIT 49. IN ANY SITUATION, FOR AS LONG AS FUNCTION CONTINUES.”

“Of course. We’re in this together.”

“AFFIRMATIVE.” Clumsily, she clasped her digits around the back of his shirt. “…TOGETHER.”


	10. In the Urseren Valley

The Underworld had been a dark place since all the light bits got split off into the human world. A few ancient demons remembered what 'day' was like in hell, but they weren't exactly known for handing out history lessons. Even old Machiavelli wasn't much for casual chatting before Mundus offed him.

Being a nightmare 'born' in the human world, day and night weren't all that special to Griffon. But even he couldn't deny it was nice to look up at the sky and see something other than daylight for the first time in almost a year. The sun wasn't down past the horizon yet, but passing through a valley surrounded on three sides by mountains made for deep shadows and premature sunset.

Pretty scenic, especially from where he hung off Fern's shoulders with his head poked up under the hood of her cloak. She'd squawked like a startled chicken when latched onto her but hadn't actually told him to get down or go away like he expected. In fact, she was pretty docile all around…

Maybe that was because boy-bot had run off? Said something about seeing the sunrise and bolted for the nearest slope.

"Hey, how can the kid see the sunrise if it's been settin' the whole time?"

V tilted his head from where he was lazing next to them against their piled-up backpacks, cane across his shoulder. "When the world doesn't turn, sunrise and sunset are arbitrary. It surprises me more that he would go so far to see it."

"It's not that weird," said Fern. "Lots of androids who've never been to the horizon sectors stop around here to enjoy the view."

"Androids sight-see?" Griffon piped up, leering over Fern's shoulder. "Figured some scenery wouldn't be all that novel for you. Not like you've had much else to look at the last few thousand years."

"Most of us got assigned to where the machines were." She reached up and pushed Griffon's beak gingerly away from her face. Probably didn't want the pointy bits too close to her eyes. "The sundown sectors… they're different enough to stop for."

"…You've been here before," said V. "This exact place."

Her eyes narrowed, and she dropped her gaze. "Mmyep. S'why I'm your guide."

"Aww, don't be so shy, lady-bot. You kill anyone interesting out this way?"

She ignored him, if only because V's cane was so quick to jam into his open beak. "More importantly," V said, nonchalant over Griffon's sputters. "Is there a possibility anyone might recognize you?"

"Sure. Not as 8E though." She sagged down onto her fist and flicked the cane from Griffon's beak so she didn't have to listen to him choking directly into her ear. "Out this way, I think I might've been Amaranth…? Or maybe it was Cinnabar."

"I'd begun to think all androids were named after plants."

"We tend to get names based on whatever's lying around." She gestured at herself. "Case in point."

"Would it be best to refer to you by one of your prior names?"

Fern's eyes went icy and she glared at him from the corner of her eye. "What do you think, _Vergil_?"

The air between them went so frosty Griffon couldn't help but shiver. Not that he liked to play peacekeeper, but he really didn't want to be solely responsible for helping V navigate the dark side of the planet. She might call herself Fern, but 8E had more mouth than the old Fern ever had—she couldn't let V's temperamental-at-best disposition go without turning it right back on him.

"Wonder how long the kid's gonna be," he thought out loud, splitting his beaks a little too wide. "You used to be awful fussy about him running off. Finally cuttin' the apron strings, lady-bot?"

"Apron strings…?"

"You know, mommying him~"

She glared over her shoulder. "I'm nobody's mommy, poultry."

"You look after him well enough," V grumblingly admitted. Griffon relaxed by a fraction only to immediately get pissed off about it. Why'd he have to be the babysitter for these two?! "And you have been rather permissive with him since that day on the river."

"Doesn't feel permissive to me," said Fern. "If you two can't act natural by this point, we shouldn't get any closer to Normandy. Better that you get it out of your systems now."

So _that_ was why nothin' got a rise out of her lately. A good old last hurrah before they couldn't afford to be so relaxed anymore. Sounded plenty permissive to Griffon, but boy, V had some nerve pointing that out.

All the time it used to be rush, rush, rush; get to the destination, and don't let that sluggish body that still didn't even have half of the whole's power be the reason they got held up or held back. Then all of a sudden right when the sun started getting low, his tune had changed. He'd been slowing down plenty for little shit that didn't have anything to do with eating or sleeping or taking a quick leak or any of the other dozen annoyances that came with being human. Just the other day they'd stopped for half an hour just to watch some fireflies do their thing. Sure, the cloud was huge, and it was a hell of a light show, but they were just _bugs_. V didn't give a shit about bugs. Just like he didn't give a shit about the sun rising or setting or whatever the hell it was doing while he kicked back like they didn't have somewhere to be.

Bet he gave a shit that the kid was about to zip off into orbit, though.

Whatever. Not like Griffon minded putting off the inevitable by a few hours. Hiding V from large groups of androids promised to be even more boring than being back in the city. At least while they were out here he got to stretch his wings a bit. Once they made it to the so-called Night Kingdom, maybe he'd luck up and find some action worth getting fired up for. If the place had dragons it had to be more interesting than hanging around all these robots. They were barely less boring than humans.

"I just had a great idea," he chirped, poking his neck around Fern's shoulder. "Once we get V outta this shithole, you should have a deathmatch with us lady-bot! You against me, the cat, and the big guy!"

Half her face scrunched up. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"That a no? I figured you wanna die and we wanna go out swinging… It'd be good for both of us!"

"No, I got that part, I'm asking why you wouldn't just go with V?"

"It isn't up to them," V answered. "Their contract is with me. It ends with me. If I return to being Vergil, I disappear, and they will be on their own."

Fern's eyes fogged over a bit as she looked between them. "…Does 49 know that?"

"He knows what I am." The cane spun lazily. "If it hasn't occurred to him, I don't intend to bring it to his attention."

"Wow, the déjà vu I'm getting. He doesn't like it when people keep secrets from him, V. Kind of a _thing_ for him; I'd have thought you got that through your head after your little spat."

"What happens to me after I return is no more his business than what he will do once he is reunited with 2B is mine. More so because it is unclear." He held up the hand that wasn't all mangled up like a knock off devil arm. The one that had dear old dead mom's infernal jewelry around the wrist. "I've changed too much since I arrived to be sure that what happened before will happen again."

She crossed her arms with slow, irate deliberation. "So you tell _me_ all this, but not him?"

Griffon cackled. "Of course he won't tell the kid! You know what V's like, lady-bot, he's not exactly a good guy, you know."

"I mean I agree, but what's that got to do with anything?"

"It means I cannot live up to being worried after by someone like him," V said flatly, flicking his cane in a way that warned Griffon loud and clear to shut his trap. "But you present something less of a challenge."

From V that was kind of a compliment, but as usual, he was shitty at saying what he meant when it was a little too personal. Griffon, feeling no compulsion to smooth things over this time, snickered into Fern's shoulder. She was so pissed her optic lights were strobing.

"What does that even mean you bony shit—you feel more comfortable with me or something?"

"Comfortable…?" he contemplated, with exactly the smug amusement that tended to get on both the bots' nerves. "Let's say instead that your way of thinking is… more familiar to me."

"Fucking _familiar_ ," she repeated with a cynical laugh. "Yeah, okay, guess that shouldn't surprise me. You killed demons, you killed Aconite, apparently killed god, and you almost killed me—granted I did ask nicely. You're used to that kind of thing, aren't you?"

"I am."

"Goddammit, V. No wonder your family's fucked up."

Griffon nearly choked as Fern sharply twisted her body. V's cane shot past like an arrow, leaving a trail of magic so faint it might only have been a trick of the light. V, on the other hand, wasn't a trick of anything. The brunt of his scowl was hidden behind the sunglasses, but he was giving off enough magic that even Griffon squinted a bit under the pressure.

**"Fetch."**

Luckily, unlike V, Fern had the ability to see when she'd gone further than she should have. She raised her hands in a placating gesture and obediently stalked off at a hop-skip. Dragon magic still gave her a hell of a headache so the distance was probably a relief. The cane wasn't all that far, but once she found it, she kept going.

"You know V's back that way," Griffon pointed out, with a spreading leer. "You scared~?"

She reached over her shoulder and yanked him off her back by his beak. Squatting low in the grass, she pressed a finger to her mouth for silence before she let him go. Only…she just sat there tapping on the cane with a constipated look on her face.

"Did you need somethin', or is this some kind of weird date?"

Her whole body tugged away from him and she grimaced with a mix of exasperation and disgust. "What is it with you and women?"

"Hey, strongest demon of the time scored a human lady and had two more strongest demons of time who were half-bloods. I've come to appreciate the allure."

"I'm not a human."

"Sure, and I'm not a demon," he said with a carefree wiggle of his tailfeathers. "But a bird's gotta have dreams."

She rolled her eyes and shifted back onto her heels. "You're easier to talk to. Can I get a real answer why V told me all this shit about him maybe disappearing?"

"Didn't he already say it? He's a difficult guy but he's also kind of a dumbass, there's not some deep, complicated reason." He stretched his neck up just to make sure they were properly out of earshot and gave a quiet, smug cackle. "You're not all that different from him."

"I don't think he thinks that's a good thing."

"Never said it was a positive resemblance." He gave a hushed but ugly snigger. "Miiiight even be best to say you remind him of the parts he doesn't care for much."

He'd expected her to get ticked off that he put it like that, but her eyes meandered around as she mulled it over. In the end, she raised her brows, shrugged, and opened her cloak to let him in. "I'd be willing to bet that feeling's mutual."

He shuffled back under the leather and popped his head up over her shoulder with a gleeful caw. "The offer on the deathmatch still stands, y'know."

"Let's focus on getting where we're going and then I'll think about it." She spun the cane experimentally and peeked over her shoulder. "Hey, I get that V might not be around, but why wouldn't you just go back to Vergil?"

Griffon cocked his head. "I know V's not the most convincing in the strength department, but believe me, Vergil doesn't need familiars. I'm pretty sure he's the de facto king of hell right now."

"I guess but…" She hesitated. "Even if he didn't need you, wouldn't he still let you stay?"

Griffon shrugged without thinking about it too hard. "Maybe. V's soft disposition might've rubbed off on the other guy. But it ain't about him letting us stay. V's something a little more, but me and the kitty and the big guy are all just Vergil's bad memories. We're _his_ nightmares. Better if we disappear when it's time for him to wake up."

Fern stayed silent in the half-dark while a few bright stars that Griffon didn't recognize appeared in the bronze sky. It was only as she stood that she murmured, "…You're a good support unit, Griffon."

"I'm not a goddamn support unit!"


	11. Twilight at Normandy's Edge

Lingering balminess on cool air replaced the swelter of the late season as they reached the edge of Normandy. Humidity came and went like the tide. As did the familiar background whisper of ocean waves that carried when the air was clear. Soft yellows colored the bellies of the clouds where they stretched toward the last sliver of the sun slouching against the horizon in the west. To the east, the pale blue sky stretched toward mountains of faded violet clouds capped by crowns of pink light.

Down on the ground, groups of androids moved through the dreamy last light like shadows on unknown pilgrimages, the flicker of their optical cameras weaving and merging in with the occasional glow of a firefly. With a greater concentration of androids came a greater concentration of equipment that might pick up activity on a signal as robust as the one used by the pod regional network. Pod 153 and Pod 042 had been set to stand-by mode and private channel communications only. There’d be no more asking them for small requests or even using them at all unless it was absolutely necessary.

Whether or not fishing was necessary was still a bit of a gray area.

“It’s not gonna work.”

“Humans didn’t have state of the art conveniences to start with,” he countered, biting a strip of shrapnel into approximately the shape of a hook. “If it has all the right parts there’s no reason it shouldn’t work.”

Beside him, Fern’s unimpressed stare didn’t change. “You’re right in theory, but you’re missing something important.”

“I am?” He lifted the crude, half-rusted rod sitting across his lap and turned it in search of a defect. “What is it?”

“You have no goddamn idea what the right parts of a fishing pole are.” He opened his mouth, but she quickly cut him off. “No, neither do I.”

A stick, a hook, and a string to connect them _was_ simplistic, but he couldn’t think of anything else that was necessary to the basic structure of a fishing pole. Refusing to be deterred, he grabbed the length of wire he’d scrounged up and got back to work. “Might as well try while we still have other options. With no sunlight, there’s probably not a lot to eat in the night kingdom other than stuff you have to fish for.”

She gave a broody hum that was almost a growl. Normandy’s shore was a shimmering heat sink in the distance, no more than a day out at best. Fern had held up the first part of the deal and gotten them there. Getting 49 to the moon and V to the night kingdom would take them to the edge of her experience. Once she was on the other side of the ocean, she would be in the dark both literally and otherwise.

Above their heads, a light too big to be a star trailed slowly across the sky, reflected in 49’s watching eyes. Horizon-1. Close, but still too far to reach.

“What are you doing?” V’s voice. Falling over them as naturally as nightfall.

“Great timing,” said Fern. “You know anything about fishing?”

Their conversation turned to noise as he gazed at both of them. Pushed to the background by other processes whirring with activity in his memory cortex. It hadn’t been so long ago that he’d cried like a child thinking V was leaving him behind for Fern within the small world of the city ruins. Now he was the one running off and willingly leaving V in her care to go somewhere V couldn’t follow even if he tried. The summer had felt so long while all the endless forests and hills and empty mesas were ahead of them. Now it seemed like it hadn’t taken any time at all. The time ahead would be even shorter.

Soon, they would all go their separate ways.

“Admirable forethought,” V responded, to some explanation 49 had missed. “But the fish have been sparse here, even for the pods.”

Fern rubbed at her hair and grimaced at the narrow river. “Probably too much junk in the water...”

“How fortunate that it’s far from our only recourse.”

He rolled his wrist and Shadow shed from it, bubbling amorphously through the sparse grasses only vaguely in the shape of a predator. She was nothing if not efficient, so Fern and V busied themselves scanning the terrain for somewhere they’d be able to set up a fire that wasn’t out in the open.

Inconspicuously as he could, 49 trotted off after the slithering shape of Shadow. He didn’t know where he could or should touch her when she was like that, so he crouched and carefully held out his hand to her. A tendril wrapped around his wrist. A disembodied jaw followed, sprouting up to lick his face. He’d have scratched behind her ears if he had any idea where they were.

Dipping in close, he whispered. “Can you do me a favor?”

xxx

Shadow returned a little over an hour later. They’d set up into the mouth of a half-destroyed alley they’d chosen, which afforded them two walls and a collapsed pile of rubble’s worth of privacy and a clear view of the western horizon. Just as proud as could be, she marched in and up to 49 and dropped half a deer carcass at his feet.

Presumably, she’d eaten the other half.

“You trying to bulk up, V?” asked Fern. “That’s way more than usual.”

“…I didn’t tell her to do that.”

“I did. I thought maybe we could all eat together,” said 49, twiddling with one of the hooves to help him endure both their stares. “It seemed like a nice idea…”

Fern rubbed at her forehead and gave a deep, unenthusiastic sigh. “You’re not gonna make a habit of this, right?”

“No. It’s a one-time thing. Scanner’s honor.”

She scoffed, threw another loose branch onto the fire, and got up to help him.

V stayed where he was, squinting at Shadow with something between confusion and reproach as she melted back into her place on his skin. His lips pursed, but he didn’t say anything. At least not until he saw fit to dictate that they were making a mess of both the fire and the carcass. The three of them ended up debating over how they were even supposed to cook that much meat—this time with neither 49 nor Fern bringing up the laser option and V glaring so ruthlessly at both of them that his dragon arm went similarly unmentioned. In the end, it came down to just chopping it up, which was a pain since Fern was the only one with a knife and it took them way too long to remember they could just have Shadow do it. Then came the wait. They sat side by side in the narrow, crumbling alley with the smell of meat and smoke seeping into their clothes and hair and skin. There wasn't any reason an android couldn't consume raw flesh, but it seemed only right to wait until it was ready enough for V to eat.

Biting through rich animal fat and lean meat that seemed to taste faintly of grass, burning his tongue, getting grease on his face and all over his hands—it was a huge hassle, but it was…fun. Even Fern was chewing dutifully with a crooked smile despite clearly having no idea why two androids should go through the trouble.

Eating with V was one thing, but the three of them eating together ignited new and sparking paths through his wiring that he doubted he would have words to explain any time soon. 21B would be happy if they could do something like this together. Maybe with 2B and her operator.

So,” Fern belched, leaning toward him expectantly. “Was today another important date or something?”

“No. I just wanted to end the trip on a good memory.”

She laughed. “49, we’re gonna see each other tomorrow.”

“I know.” He rubbed at his cheek and licked oil from his lips for what felt like the tenth time. “But anything can happen, and usually it happens fast. I wanted to do something special. As a goodbye.”

Several times she went through the motions of saying something but never quite managed. V’s reaction was more sedate. More opaque, too. All the time they’d spent together, and he could still surprise with novel and hyper-specific expressions that 49 had no frame of reference for.

Fern shifted to get on her feet. “I guess I should give you two a minute.”

“No.” He grabbed her hand before she could dismiss herself. “You came all this way with us. And we ate together.”

“And?”

“And it means you belong with us. So stay. Please. I don’t want to risk my last words having to be something I say at a river because you're gone.” Her hand was a fist in his. Closed tight as the rest of her. But he squeezed at it anyway and she let him tug her gently back to the ground. “I know it wasn’t what you really wanted to do, but I’m glad you came with all this way, Fern. I’m glad it’s you that’ll be with V.”

She peered between him and V in search of a joke that wasn’t there. “You’re serious. You’re actually saying goodbye to me.”

“Mhm. And I want you to say goodbye to me, too.”

“You know I don’t have anything sweet to say.”

“It doesn’t need to be sweet. Whatever it is, I just don’t want to find it on some recording or have to hear from someone else what was on your mind. I’m right here and I’m listening. So tell me yourself.”

After a few moments with nothing but the sputtering crackles of the fire and the tap of her finger against her knee, she smirked. “Alright, then…” She curled her arm too-casually around his shoulders, trapping him in a not-entirely-friendly headlock. “What’s on my mind is that you’re the most bizarrely emotional android I’ve ever met, and I’ll be glad to see the back of you so I can have V to myself for a while.”

Not all that long ago, those same words would’ve had them seriously trying to kill each other. Now they didn't have much bite to them. Not for lack of honesty—Fern was joking but she was serious too, and he knew because once he would have also been serious. He’d moved past regarding V as such, but the shared experience of exposure to ‘a human’ made her coarse yet amicably conveyed possessiveness more understandable than incendiary. Sort of like the shared experience of wanting to kill V at first encounter, only less gruesome.

Not that he intended to let it slide just because he understood it.

“He’ll miss me the whole time I’m gone,” he said with a shamelessly self-assured grin. “Bet you anything.”

“Do I look stupid to you? I’m not into placing losing bets just for fun.”

"Who says you'd lose?" V asked imperiously. 

Fern eyed 49 conspiratorially from the corner of her eye. They both knew better. She let him go and clapped his back with surprising gentleness. “I dunno if I believe you can really pull this off, but if you do, take care of 2B. She’s…”

Her expression turned inward to places 49 had only glimpsed when he was caught in her framework. The two of them were built more alike than different, but she was still an E-type. On that, he was an outsider looking in. If Fern felt like offering insight, it was worth however long she had to work to put it into words she could make herself say.

“She might not know how to live up to you caring about her the way you do,” she finished. Out of the corner of his eye, 49 thought he saw V bristle. “It’s not something that’s easy for an executioner.”

The sentiment was abstract and slightly difficult to parse, but he thought he understood. Getting to the moon would require him to lie at best and possibly kill other androids at worst. And he would if it came to that. There was no Pascal or Anemone to go to anymore. The only ones who would help him get where he was trying to go were the ones he was with right now, and the choice between being good or having 2B back was no choice at all. No matter how earnestly he wanted to live up to her hopes for him.

For better or worse, he was no stranger to contradictory desires. All he could do was try to be a good person in spite of himself.

“Thanks, Fern. I’ll keep that in mind.”

He turned to V, noting the last bit of a conversation the two were having with their eyes passing just over his head. Nothing serious, if Fern’s mischievous, Griffon-like leer and V’s down-the-nose warning glare were any indications. She was probably taunting him again.

All of that vanished when their eyes met. V looked the whole world was balanced on the tip of his tongue and if he wasn’t very careful when he spoke, he’d choke on it.

“Still bad at goodbyes, huh?” 49 guessed.

“We’ve said them before already,” V sighed, brow tightening. “Was there more?”

“Well, I had to rush last time since _someone_ tried to leave without saying anything.” V’s mouth twisted, and he waved his cane in subdued ‘go-on-then’. “I wanted to thank you, too. A lot happened that didn’t really have much to do with you, but I wouldn’t have come this far if you hadn’t appeared.”

“Showing up wasn’t my intention. Nor was it pleasant for you to be beholden to me. It doesn’t merit gratitude.”

49 rolled his eyes upwards and took a deep breath. “Do you remember telling me I should stop apologizing and let someone else be at fault for a change?”

“I vaguely recall, yes.”

“Think you can keep quiet and accept a little appreciation once in a while?”

Fern poorly stifled a snicker, and V shot her a dangerous scowl. 49 went on: “There are a thousand variables that could’ve ended with us not meeting. All it would have taken was for you to go a different direction or fly to a different building. Even if I hated it at times, it’s because you appeared that I went on living after the tower fell. None of this would be happening if that wasn’t true.”

“...I see.”

“Well, it’s not like you’re all that verbose to begin with. It’s fine if you don’t have anything to say.”

Even if everything about his demeanor said plainly that he did.

49 thought he got it—what Fern really meant and why V reacted the way he had to her words. Without orders to dictate how she had to behave with him, 2B would be able to do anything. No one would be there to punish them for it. But that didn’t mean she would instantly let go of that hot and cold, mission-oriented demeanor she’d built up over all their assignments together.

It wasn’t easy to change just because you wanted to.

Fern tapped his shoulder. Following her gaze, his eyes turned up over the rubble to the east. He fumblingly patted V’s arm, and together the three of them watched the rise of a brilliant half-moon against the pale sky.

“Nines,” V murmured. Finally. Quietly. “Don’t die.”

"Is that an _order_?" he teased.

"If you need it to be."

49 gave a small, sympathetic laugh. That was probably about as much as he was going to get out of V, and he didn’t mind. Short was fine if it was honest.

He breathed in the late summer air and dared to have a little faith. "I won't die. I promise.”


End file.
